This book brings together papers by the foremost representatives of a range of theoretical and empirical approaches converging on a common goal: to account for language use, or how speakers actually speak and understand language. Crucial to a usage-based approach are frequency, statistical patterns, and, most generally, linguistic experience. Linguistic competence is not seen as cognitively-encapsulated and divorced from performance, but as a system continually shaped, from inception, by linguistic usage events. The authors represented here were among the first to leave behind rule-based linguistic representations in favour of constraint-based systems whose structural properties actually emerge from usage. Such emergentist systems evince far greater cognitive and neurological plausibility than algorithmic, generative models. Approaches represented here include Cognitive Grammar, the Lexical Network Model, Competition Model, Relational Network Model, and accessibility Theory. The empirical data come from phonological variation, syntactic change, psycholinguistic experiments, discourse, connectionist modelling of language acquisition, and linguistic corpora.

Usage-based approaches to language have gained increasing attention in the last two decades. The importance of change and variation has always been recognized in this framework, but has never received central attention. It is the main aim of this book to fill this gap. Once we recognize that usage is crucial for our understanding of language and linguistic structures, language change and variation inevitably take centre stage in linguistic analysis. Along these lines, the volume presents eight studies by international authors that discuss various approaches to studying language change from a usage-based perspective. Both theoretical issues and empirical case studies are well-represented in this collection. The case studies cover a variety of different languages – ranging from historically well-studied European languages via Japanese to the Amazonian isolate Yurakaré with no written history at all. The book provides new insights relevant for scholars interested in both functional and cognitive linguistic theory, in historical linguists and in language typology.

When humans learn languages, are they also learning how to create shared meaning? In The Usage-based Study of Language Learning and Multilingualism, a cadre of international experts say yes and offer cutting-edge research in usage-based linguistics to explore how language acquisition, in particular multilingual language acquisition, works. Each chapter presents an original study that supports the view that language learning is initiated through local and meaningful communication with others. Over an accumulated history of such usage, people gradually create more abstract, interactive schematic representations, or a mental grammar. This process of acquiring language is the same for infants and adults and across varied contexts, such as the family, the classroom, the laboratory, a hospital, or a public encounter. Employing diverse methodologies to study this process, the contributors here work with target languages, including Cantonese, English, French, French Sign Language, German, Hebrew, Malay, Mandarin, Spanish, and Swedish, and offer a much-needed exploration of this growing area of linguistic research.

The study of code-switching has been carried out from linguistic, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic perspectives, largely in isolation from each other. This volume attempts to unite these three research strands by placing at the centre of the enquiry the role played by social factors in the occurrence, forms, and outcomes of code-switching. The contributions in this volume are divided into three parts: “code-switching between cognition and socio-pragmatics”, “multilingual interaction and identity”, and “code-switching and social structure”. The case studies represent contact settings on five continents and feature languages with diverse linguistic affiliations. They are predictive and descriptive in their research goals and rely on experimental or naturalistic data. But they share the common goal of seeking to explain how social structures, ideologies, and identity impact on the grammatical and conversational features of code-switching and language mixing, and on the emergence of mixed languages. Given its scope, this volume is a significant addition to the empirical and theoretical foundations of the study of code-switching. It is also of relevance to the general debate on the inter-relationships between language and society.

In this groundbreaking book, Tomasello presents a comprehensive usage-based theory of language acquisition. Drawing together a vast body of empirical research in cognitive science, linguistics, and developmental psychology, Tomasello demonstrates that we don't need a self-contained "language instinct" to explain how children learn language. Their linguistic ability is interwoven with other cognitive abilities.

A COMPANION TO CHOMSKY Widely considered to be one of the most important public intellectuals of our time, Noam Chomsky has revolutionized modern linguistics. His thought has had a profound impact upon the philosophy of language, mind, and science, as well as the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science which his work helped to establish. Now, in this new Companion dedicated to his substantial body of work and the range of its influence, an international assembly of prominent linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists reflect upon the interdisciplinary reach of Chomsky's intellectual contributions. Balancing theoretical rigor with accessibility to the non-specialist, the Companion is organized into eight sections—including the historical development of Chomsky's theories and the current state of the art, comparison with rival usage-based approaches, and the relation of his generative approach to work on linguistic processing, acquisition, semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language. Later chapters address Chomsky's rationalist critique of behaviorism and related empiricist approaches to psychology, as well as his insistence upon a "Galilean" methodology in cognitive science. Following a brief discussion of the relation of his work in linguistics to his work on political issues, the book concludes with an essay written by Chomsky himself, reflecting on the history and character of his work in his own words. A significant contribution to the study of Chomsky's thought, A Companion to Chomsky is an indispensable resource for philosophers, linguists, psychologists, advanced undergraduate and graduate students, and general readers with interest in Noam Chomsky's intellectual legacy as one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century.

The study of grammatical variation in language mixing has been at the core of research into bilingual language practices. Although various motivations have been proposed in the literature to account for possible mixing patterns, some of them are either controversial, or remain untested. Little is still known about whether and how frequency of use of linguistic elements can contribute to the patterning of bilingual talk. This book is the first to systematically explore the factor usage frequency in a corpus of bilingual speech. The two aims are (i) to describe and analyze the variation in mixing patterns in the speech of Russia German adolescents and young adults in Germany, and (ii) to propose and test usage-based explanations of variation in mixing patterns in three morphosyntactic contexts: the adjective-modified noun phrase, the prepositional phrase, and the plural marking of German noun insertions in bilingual sentences. In these contexts, German noun insertions combine with either Russian or German words and grammatical markers, thus yielding mixed bilingual and German monolingual constituents in otherwise Russian sentences, the latter also labelled as embedded-language islands. The results suggest that the frequency with which words are used together mediates the distribution of mixing patterns in each of the examined contexts. The differing impacts of co-occurrence frequency are attributed to the distributional and semantic specifics of the analyzed morphosyntactic configurations. Lexical frequency has been found to be another important determinant in this variation. Other factors include recency, or lexical priming, in discourse in the case of prepositional phrases, and phonological and structural similarities and differences in the inflectional systems of the contact languages in the case of plural marking.