Is frequency an explanatory causal concept in linguistics?

In the last two decades, the use of quantitative methods in synchronic and diachronic linguistics has been booming. Surely, this development is to be welcomed, if only because it has enriched the ways of thinking about various important problems of linguistic inquiry. Many linguists now agree that data on frequencies of occurrence serve more than just illustrative purposes. Anyone who has taken the trouble to study large amounts of language data in view of the subtleties of formal and semantic variation, both synchronically and diachronically, will readily admit that corpus-based research U+2013 and quantitative variationist research at large U+2013 reveals more than any intuition-based or introspection-based focus can provide. As a rule, the outcome of such analyses is likely to make a linguist a more humble scholar: if linguistic research does not restrict itself to the identification of U+201Cclear casesU+201D in the grammar, naturally occurring utterances more often than not show a much greater amount of variation than what one would expect on the basis of oneU+2019s own linguistic competence. However, this finding is as much in need of explanation as the structure of an individualU+2019s knowledge of grammar. This is the subject of the present article.

Publication year:2014

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