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Corpus data and aspects of the mental lexicon from a cognitive-linguistic perspective: frequency, contingency, recency, and context

Date
Specification
hlavní budova, místnost č. 104
Speaker
  1. Stephan Th. Gries
Abstract

Over the last decades, linguistic research has become more diverse both theoretically and methodologically. With regard to the former, after a long period in which “theoretical linguistics” was synonymous with “generative linguistics”, now a wider variety of approaches have emerged; for this talk of interest are cognitive/usage-based approaches, which assume a less-than-modular linguistic system that is ‘governed’ to a large extent by domain-general mechanisms such as frequency, contingency, recency, context etc. With regard to the latter, linguists are now routinely using a wider range of data and it is corpus data that have seen a particular increase.Against this background, I will discuss in this talk ways in which corpus-based work can help explore the lexicon/construction in ways that properly operationalize the above domain-general determinants of processing and learning: frequency, contingency, recency, context. I will discuss two brief case studies – one on phonological similarity within lexical units (involving

frequency), one on multi-word identification (adding contingency) – before I turn to a broader discussion of how to involve recency and context properly to our corpus-linguistic toolkit.