Frequency Effects in Language Representation Tilsm 244/2 (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs)

This volume draws theoretical conclusions from (mis)matches between different types of empirical data. Despite the importance attributed to frequency in contemporary linguistics, the relationship between frequencies of occurrence in texts on the one hand, and status or structure in cognition as reflected in experiments on the other hand has not been studied in great detail, and hence remains poorly understood. The book explores the relationship be-tween certain aspects of language and their representation in cognition as mediated by fre-quency counts in both text and experiment. Do certain types of experimental data fit certain types of corpus data better than others? Which corpus-derived statistics correlate best with experimental results? Or do corpus data have to be understood and analyzed radically differently to obtain the wealth of cognitive information they (might) contain?