On the relationship between corpus frequency and acceptability
Elaine J. Francis · 2021
Abstract Chapter 5 starts by observing that linguists from different theoretical traditions tend to express different views on the relative importance of judgment data and corpus data for developing theories of grammatical knowledge. Similarly, although everyone recognizes frequency of use as a factor to which language users are sensitive, there is disagreement as to how it relates to acceptability. Proponents of usage-based and probabilistic theories have tended to emphasize the close correlations between frequency and acceptability, while proponents of traditional generative theories have tended to emphasize cases in which acceptability judgments differ among low-frequency or zero-frequency structures. This chapter discusses a few studies which have directly examined the relationship between corpus frequency and acceptability and considers their implications for these different theoretical approaches. Alongside more traditional corpus studies, machine learning studies are also considered.