CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 224Second Language Acquisition and LearningSyntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variationlinguistics and terminology studies

Statistical Measures for Usage‐Based Linguistics

Open access
Gries, Stefan Th., Ellis, Nick C.·2015·Language Learning
DOI 10.1111/lang.12119
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

The advent of usage‐/exemplar‐based approaches has resulted in a major change in the theoretical landscape of linguistics, but also in the range of methodologies that are brought to bear on the study of language acquisition/learning, structure, and use. In particular, methods from corpus linguistics are now frequently used to study distributional characteristics of linguistics units and what they reveal about cognitive and psycholinguistic processes. This paper surveys a range of psycholinguistic notions that are becoming ever more important in theoretical and cognitive linguistics—for example, frequency, entrenchment, dispersion, contingency, surprisal, Zipfian distributions—and current corpus‐linguistic approaches toward exploring these notions and their roles for linguistic cognition.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1111/lang.12119

Cites

9 of 9 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 61

  1. Anderson, J. R. (1989). A rational analysis of human memory. In H. L. I. Roediger & F. I. M. Craik (Eds.), Varieties of memory and consciousness: Essays in honour of Endel Tulving (pp. 195-210). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
  2. Bates, E., & MacWhinney, B. (1989). Functionalism and the competition model. In B. MacWhinney & E. Bates (Eds.), The crosslinguistic study of sentence processing (pp. 3-73). New York: Cambridge University Press.
  3. Bird, S., Loper, E., & Klein, E. (2009). Natural language processing with Python. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media Inc.
  4. Blondel, V. D., Guillaume, J.-L., Lambiotte, R., & Lefebvre, E. (2008). Fast unfolding of communities in large networks. Journal of Statistical Mechanics, P10008.
  5. Bybee, J., & Hopper, P. (Eds.). (2001). Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  6. Carey, S., & Bartlett, E. (1978). Acquiring a single new word. Proceedings of the Stanford Child Language Conference, 15, 17-29.
  7. Chalmers, D. J. (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2, 200-219.
  8. Danon, L., Díaz-Guilera, A., Duch, J., & Arenas, A. (2005). Comparing community structure identification. Journal of Statistical Mechanics, P09008.
  9. Daudaravičius, V., & Marcinkevičienė, R. (2004). Gravity counts for the boundaries of collocations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 9, 321-348.
  10. de Nooy, W., Mrvar, A., & Batagelj, V. (2010). Exploratory social network analysis with Pajek. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
  11. Dell, G. S., & Chang, F. (2014). The P-chain: Relating sentence production and its disorders to comprehension and acquisition. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B., 369, 20120394. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2012.0394. · DOI
  12. Dogruöz, A. S., & Gries, S.Th. (2012). Spread of on-going changes in an immigrant language: Turkish in the Netherlands. Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 10, 401-426.
  13. Ellis, N. C. (1994). Vocabulary acquisition: The implicit ins and outs of explicit cognitive mediation. In N. C. Ellis (Ed.), Implicit and explicit learning of languages (pp. 211-282). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
  14. Ellis, N. C. (2003). Constructions, chunking, and connectionism: The emergence of second language structure. In C. Doughty & M. H. Long (Eds.), Handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 33-68). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
  15. Ellis, N. C. (2007). Implicit and explicit knowledge about language. In J. Cenoz (Ed.), Knowledge about language (Vol. 6: Encyclopedia of Language and Education). Heidelberg, Germany: Springer Scientific.
  16. In P. Robinson & N. C. Ellis (Eds.), Handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition (pp. 372-405). London: Routledge.
  17. Ellis, N. C. (2012). Formulaic language and second language acquisition: Zipf and the phrasal teddy bear. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 32, 17-44.
  18. Ellis, N. C. (2015). Implicit AND explicit learning of language. In P. Rebuschat (Ed.), Implicit and explicit learning of language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  19. Ellis, N. C., & Ferreira-Junior, F. (2009). Constructions and their acquisition: Islands and the distinctiveness of their occupancy. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 7, 187-220.
  20. Ellis, N. C., & O'Donnell, M. B. (2012). Statistical construction learning: Does a Zipfian problem space ensure robust language learning? In P. Rebuschat & J. Williams (Eds.), Statistical learning and language acquisition (pp. 265-304). Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter.
  21. Ferrer i Cancho, R., & Solé, R. V. (2001). The small world of human language. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, B., 268, 2261-2265.
  22. Francis, G., Hunston, S., & Manning, E. (Eds.). (1996). Grammar patterns 1: Verbs. The COBUILD Series. London: HarperCollins.
  23. Girvan, M., & Newman, M. E. J. (2002). Community structure in social and biological networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA, 99, 7821-7826.
  24. Goldberg, A. E. (2006). Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
  25. Gries, S. Th. (2003). Testing the sub-test: a collocational-overlap analysis of English -ic and -ical adjectives. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 8, 31-61.
  26. Gries, S. Th. (2008). Dispersions and adjusted frequencies in corpora. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 13, 403-437.
  27. Gries, S. Th. (2009). Quantitative corpus linguistics with R: A practical introduction. London, New York: Routledge.
  28. Gries, S. Th. (2010). Dispersions and adjusted frequencies in corpora: Further explorations. In S.Th. Gries, S. Wulff, & M. Davies (Eds.), Corpus linguistic applications: Current studies, new directions (pp. 197-212). Amsterdam: Rodopi.
  29. Gries, S. Th. (2013). 50-something years of work on collocations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 18, 137-165.
  30. Gries, S. Th., & Divjak, D. S. (Eds.). (2012). Frequency effects in cognitive linguistics (Vol. 1): Statistical effects in learnability, processing and change. Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter.
  31. Gries, S. Th., Hampe, B., & Schönefeld, D. (2010). Converging evidence II: More on the association of verbs and constructions. In S. Rice & J. Newman (Eds.), Empirical and experimental methods in cognitive/functional research (pp. 59-72).
  32. Gries, S. Th., & Stefanowitsch, A. (2004). Extending collostructional analysis: A corpus-based perspective on "alternations." International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 9, 97-129.
  33. Gries, S. Th., & Wulff, S. (2009). Psycholinguistic and corpus linguistic evidence for L2 constructions. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 7, 163-186.
  34. Hanks, P. (2009). The linguistic double helix: Norms and exploitations. In Hlaváčková, D., Horák, A. Osolsobě, K. & Rychlý, P. (Eds.), After half a century of Slavonic Natural Language Processing (Festschrift for Karel Pala) (pp. 63-80). Brno, Czech Republic: Masaryk University.
  35. Jaeger, T. F., & Snider, N. E. (2008). Implicit learning and syntactic persistence: Surprisal and cumulativity. In B. C. Love, K. McRae, & V. M. Sloutsky (Eds.), Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society Conference (pp. 1061-1066). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
  36. Kolb, P. (2008). DISCO: A multilingual database of distributionally similar words. In Proceedings of KONVENS-2008, Berlin, Germany.
  37. MacDonald, M. C., & Seidenberg, M. S. (2006). Constraint satisfaction accounts of lexical and sentence comprehension. In M. J. Traxler & M. A. Gernsbacher (Eds.), Handbook of psycholinguistics (2nd ed., pp. 581-611). London: Elsevier.
  38. MacWhinney, B. (1997). Second language acquisition and the competition model. In A. M. B. De Groot & J. F. Kroll (Eds.), Tutorials in bilingualism: Psycholinguistic perspectives (pp. 113-142). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
  39. MacWhinney, B. (2001). The competition model: The input, the context, and the brain. In P. Robinson (Ed.), Cognition and second language instruction (pp. 69-90). New York: Cambridge University Press.
  40. Newell, A. (1990). Unified theories of cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  41. Newman, M. E. J. (2010). Networks: An introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
  42. Partington, A. (2011). Phrasal irony: Its form, function, and exploitation. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 1786-1800.
  43. Pedersen, T., Patwardhan, S., & Michelizzi, J. (2004). WordNet::Similarity-Measuring the relatedness of concepts. Paper presented at the Proceedings of Fifth Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2004).
  44. Pierrehumbert, J. (2006). The next toolkit. Journal of phonetics, 34, 516-530.
  45. Rebuschat, P. (Ed.). (2015). Implicit and explicit learning of language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  46. Rebuschat, P., & Williams, J. N. (Eds.). (2012). Statistical learning and language acquisition. Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter.
  47. Rescorla, R. A., & Wagner, A. R. (1972). A theory of Pavlovian conditioning: Variations in the effectiveness of reinforcement and nonreinforcement. In A. H. Black & W. F. Prokasy (Eds.), Classical conditioning II: Current theory and research (pp. 64-99). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
  48. Robinson, P., & Ellis, N. C. (Eds.). (2008). A handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition. London: Routledge.
  49. Roland, D., Dick, F., & Elman, J. L. (2007). Frequency of basic English grammatical structures: a corpus analysis. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 348-379.
  50. Rumelhart, D. E., Hinton, G. E., & Williams, R. J. (1986). Learning representations by back-propagating errors. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 323(6088), 533-536.
  51. Schmidt, R. (1994). Implicit learning and the cognitive unconscious: Of artificial grammars and SLA. In N. C. Ellis (Ed.), Implicit and explicit learning of languages (pp. 165-210). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
  52. Shanks, D. R. (1995). The psychology of associative learning. New York: Cambridge University Press.
  53. Slobin, D. I. (1997). The origins of grammaticizable notions: Beyond the individual mind. In D. I. Slobin (Ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition (Vol. 5, pp. 265-323). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
  54. Stefanowitsch, A., & Gries, S. T. (2003). Collostructions: Investigating the interaction between words and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 8, 209-243.
  55. Studdert-Kennedy, M. (1991). Language development from an evolutionary perspective. In N. A. Krasnegor, D. M. Rumbaugh, R. L. Schiefelbusch, & M. Studdert-Kennedy (Eds.), Biological and behavioral determinants of language development (pp. 5-28). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
  56. Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Boston: Harvard University Press.
  57. Trousdale, G., & Hoffmann, T. (Eds.). (2013). Oxford handbook of construction grammar. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
  58. Tversky, A. (1977). Features of similarity. Psychological Review, 84, 327-352.
  59. Wulff, S., Stefanowitsch, A., & Gries, S. T. (2007). Brutal Brits and persuasive Americans: Variety-specific meaning construction in the into-causative. In G. Radden, K.-M. Köpcke, T. Berg, & P. Siemund (Eds.), Aspects of meaning construction (pp. 265-281). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  60. Xu, F., & Tennenbaum, J. (2007). Word learning as Bayesian inference. Psychological Review, 114, 245-272.
  61. Zipf, G. K. (1949). Human behaviour and the principle of least effort: An introduction to human ecology. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Gries, S. T., & Ellis, N. C.
Affiliations
  • University of California Santa Barbara and University of Michigan Ann Arbor
  • University of California, Santa Barbara (US)
ORCID
Ellis, Nick C.
Venue
Language Learning
Publisher
Wiley
Published
2015-05-21
Volume
65
Issue
S1
Pages
228-255
ISSN
  • 0023-8333 (ISSN-L)
  • 1467-9922
DOI
10.1111/lang.12119
OpenAlex
W1960264410
Cited by
224
References
9
Citations by year
2026: 20 · 2025: 23 · 2024: 33 · 2023: 15 · 2022: 20 · 2021: 22 · 2020: 13 · 2019: 44 · 2018: 14 · 2017: 9 · 2016: 8 · 2015: 3
FWCI
28.63
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/termsAndConditions#vor (vor)
Locations
  • Language Learning (publishedVersion)
  • Deep Blue (University of Michigan) (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Second Language Acquisition and Learning
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › linguistics and terminology studies
Keywords
usage-based linguistics, statistical indicators, word frequency, entrenchment, dispersion, contingency, information content, Zipfian distribution, corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics, linguistic cognition, language acquisition

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review