Frequency and lexical specificity in grammar: A critical review

It is a central assumption of usage-based linguistics that syntactic structures, i.e. constructions, are stored and processed at different levels of abstractness and that lowerlevel constructions are associated with particular lexemes. There is evidence from a wide range of studies that the language user’s knowledge of constructions includes detailed information about specific words, which influences sentence comprehension and production and diachronic language change. The current paper provides an overview of this research and considers the cognitive mechanisms that underlie the emergence of lexically particular constructions. Researchers agree that frequency affects the interaction between lexemes and constructions; but the cognitive effects of frequency on lexical specificity are not yet fully understood. Some usage-based linguists have argued that the exemplar mechanism of category learning accounts for the redundant storage of lexically particular constructions alongside more general, i.e. schematic syntactic representations; but the current paper argues that the exemplar model needs to be augmented by a linear processing mechanism, i.e. automatization, in order to explain how lexemes and constructions are related. 1 I would like to thank Heike Behrens and Karin Madlener for helpful comments and suggestions.