[Corpora-List] Call for paper to theme session (ICLC 2009)

[Stefan Th. Gries]

First call for papers to a theme session at the
International Cognitive Linguistics Conference 2009, UC Berkeley

"Frequency effects in language"
Stefan Th. Gries (UCSB) and Dagmar Divjak (University of Sheffield)


### CONTENTS ###
Within cognitive linguistics, the notion of frequency has long been
recognized as a vital part of many different aspects of linguistic
representation, processing, and change. Virtually every domain of
linguistics has been found to reveal systematic frequency effects:

- in first language acquisition, the frequency with which a child
hears particular words or patterns affects the ease/speed with which
s/he acquires these words and patterns (cf., e.g., Goodman, Dale, and
Li 2007, Tomasello 2003, Goldberg 2006);
- in diachronic linguistics, frequency effects have been shown to
drive grammaticalization (cf. Lindquist and Mair 2004);
- in phonology, frequency of co-occurrence predicts degrees of
phonological reduction (cf., e.g., Bybee and Scheibman 1999, Gahl and
Garnsey 2004);
- in syntax, (co-occurrence) frequencies are correlated with syntactic
choices in language production (cf., e.g., Bresnan et al. 2007);

Cf. also Bybee and Hopper (1997), Barlow and Kemmer (2000), or Ellis
(2002) for overviews. In addition, the development of exemplar-based
and probabilistic psycholinguistic models of representation and
processing has provided cognitive linguistics with a robust
psycholinguistic underpinning from which to derive testable
predictions. In spite of these advances, work involving frequencies
has also encountered problems that merit more attention than they have
so far received:

- often, linguistic elements are differently frequent in different
corpora or even different parts of one and the same corpus(cf.
Schlüter 2005, Gries 2006, Newman et al., in progress);
- the frequency estimates arrived at on the basis of corpora are often
at odds with frequency estimates obtained through experiments such as
elicitation tasks or direct frequency estimates (cf. Gilquin 2003,
Nordquist 2006, to appear, Divjak to appear, McGee to appear);
- there are more and more scholars who use the WWW to obtain frequency
estimates in spite of the fact that (i) such frequencies will again
differ from all others obtained and (ii) the WWW does not provide
frequency data but dispersion data; in addition, it is unclear
whether, for the purposes of cognitive linguistics, dispersion data
would not be more appropriate than frequency data as an
operationalization of entrenchment; and, if that would be the case,
which of the various ways to measure dispersion would be most
appropriate (cf. Gries, to appear).

For this theme session, we invite corpus-based and/or experimental
papers that explore and discuss frequency effects from a
cognitive-linguistic or psycholinguistic perspective. Contributions
from all sorts of domains (e.g., language acquisition, language
development, or language processing) and linguistic subdisciplines
(phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) will be
considered. We are interested in empirical studies and especially
welcome submissions which discuss diverging evidence, i.e. different
outcomes resulting from using different methods.


### SUBMISSION PROCEDURE ###
Please submit
WHAT: your 500-word abstract (1" margins, Times New Roman, size 12
font) as .odt, .rtf, or .doc file
WHEN: by September 5, 2009
TO WHOM: <stgries -AT- linguistics.ucsb.edu> *and*
         <d.divjak -AT- sheffield.ac.uk>
in an email with the subject heading "ICLC 2009 theme session"; the
body of your e-mail should include
- title of paper
- name(s) of author(s)
- affiliation
- contact e-mail address.


### REFERENCES ###
Barlow, Michael and Suzanne Kemmer (eds.). 2000. Usage-based models of
language. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Bresnan, Joan, Anna Cueni, Tatiana Nikitina, and R. Harald Baayen.
2007. Predicting the dative alternation. In: G. Boume, I. Kraemer, and
J. Zwarts (eds.). Cognitive foundations of interpretation. Amsterdam:
Royal Netherlands Academy of Science, 69-94.
Bybee, Joan L. and Paul J. Hopper (eds.). 1997. Frequency and the
emergence of linguistic structure. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.
Bybee, Joan and Joanne Scheibman. 1999. The effect of usage on degrees
of constituency: the reduction of don't in English. Linguistics
37:575-96.
Divjak, Dagmar S. to appear. On (in)frequency and (un)acceptability.
In: B. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (ed.). Corpus Linguistics, computer
tools and applications - state of the art.  Frankfurt a. Main: Peter
Lang, 1-21.
Ellis, Nick C. 2002. Frequency effects in language processing and
acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 24:143-88.
Gahl, Susanne and Susan Marie Garnsey. 2004. Knowledge of grammar,
knowledge of usage: syntactic probabilities affect pronunciation
variation. Language 80:748-75.
Gilquin, Gaetanelle. 2003. Prototypicality: Corpus vs. elicitation.
Paper presented at ICLC-8. University of La Rioja, Spain, 20-25 July
2003.
Goldberg, Adele E. 2006. Constructions at work. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goodman, Judith C., Philip S. Dale, and Ping Li. 2008. Does frequency
count? Parental input and the acquisition of vocabulary. Journal of
Child Language 35:515-31.
Gries, Stefan Th. 2006. Exploring variability within and between
corpora: some methodological considerations. Corpora 1:109-51.
Gries, Stefan Th. to appear. Dispersions and adjusted frequencies in
corpora. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics.
Lindquist, Hans and Christian Mair (eds.). 2004. Corpus approaches to
grammaticalization in English. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.
McGee, Iain. to appear. Adjective-noun collocations in elicited and
corpus data: similarities: differences and the whys and wherefores.
Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory.
Newman, John, Philip Dilts, Stefan Th. Gries, and Cyrus Shaoul. in
progress. Ngrams: Google vs. corpora. (working title)
Nordquist, Dawn. 2004. Comparing elicited data and corpora. In: Michel
Achard and Suzanne Kemmer (eds.). Language, culture, and mind.
Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 211-23.
Nordquist, Dawn. to appear. Investigating elicited data from a
usage-based perspective. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory.
Schlueter, Norbert. 2006. How reliable are the results? Comparing
corpus-based studies of the present perfect. Zeitschrift fuer
Anglistik und Amerikanistik 54:135-148.
Tomasello, Michael. 2003. Constructing a language: a usage-based
theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
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