Empirical evidence for an inflationist lexicon
Antoine Tremblay · Yearbook of Phraseology · 2012
Although Generative and Cognitive grammars both assume that some linguistic forms are stored as wholes while others are strung together from simpler parts, they differ with respect to the units that may be stored in the lexicon, and therefore in the rules that combine them.Within the Generative framework, the determining factor for storage is regularity.In contrast, for Cognitive grammarians frequency of use is an important factor determining whether a form is stored as a whole or (de)composed on-line.The studies summarized in this paper show that speakers are sensitive not only to the (continuous) frequency/probability of use of single words but also of compositional bigrams (I really), trigrams (I really like), and quadgrams (I really like it).They clearly support the Cognitive view of a redundant, inflationist lexicon that is comprised of a myriad of more or less entrenched linguistic units of different lengths.Implications regarding the entrenchment of N-grams, the opacity of an entrenched N-gram, and the threshold for holistic storage of an N-gram are discussed.