r

THE NEW PSYCHOI10GY

OF LANGUAGE

Cognitive and Functional

Approaches to Language Structure

Volume 2

Edited by

Michael TOlnasello
Max Planck Institute jiJr Evoluti()n.m~v AnthlD/}()l
Leipzig, Gennany

1m
2003

LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PliBLISI IERS

Mahwah, New Jersey

Introduction:

Some Surprises for Psychologists

Michael Tomasello
Max Planck Institute

}
R

-"

Linguistics can sometimes he a technical discipline, with a rcalit\, and a v()

cabu\;uyall its OWII. For this reason, psychologists have oneil \\ailcd ('or lin
guists to tell them what langllage is-that is, give them a good
according to the latest theory-so tbey can go on to study its
sion, processing, and acquisition. But mllch of the lllcol'cti(,d fralll('\\ork
and vocabulary of modern linguistic theories relies on the calegories and
terminology of traditional Wt~steru linguistics. Traditional Wcslt'rn lillgllis
tics arose historically in the Middle Ages (Iinl11 Greek and ROinan
mainly for the teaching of Latin as a language of scholarship, '!OUIlS ,mel
verbs, su~jects and objects, predicate adjcClin's and pr('(II(;[I(' lIominaL-. arc
manifestly not phenomena that were ueated by psychologists, or ('\'('11 lin
guists with a psychological bent, with the goal of descrihing hm\ ;t!! Ill<' peo..
of the world, speaking more than 5,000 dilferenl
comprehend and use a naturallangllage. Many of thcm arc not
at all to many non-European languages (Croft, in press;
It may be that some of these categories arc indeed lIscful for the
tory purposes of psycholinguists. But some lllay not be; it is in each case all
empirical question, And that is oIle of the revolutionary aspects of the IlCW
wave oflinguistic theories that By under the banner of FUllctiona! ,md/or
Cognitive Linguistics. Although they too IISC technical
of it from the traditional vocabulary-in principle each
defined with respect to the function it serves in real proccsses of
communication. I n addition to this general fUllctional (Hicillal i( 1Il. (:( )[!;ni

TOMASELlO

tive-Functional (Usage-Based) linguists also make the "cognitive commit

ment" to couch their definitions and explanations as much as possible in

theon~tical constructs and terminolob'Y that are compatible with those of

the other Cognitive Sciences (Lakoff, 1990). This makes the work more ac

cessible to psychologists, and indeed it is even possible now that

gists can share in the discussion and help to identify psychologically real lin

guistic entities involved in processes of linguistic communication.

This is the reasoning behind the title The New PI),cholo{,,'Y

Lang;uage,
which is descriptive of the chapters both in Tomasello (1998) and in the
current volume. Structural linguistics adopts many categories of traditional
Western linguistics uncritically-indeed positing them as innate asoectB of
a supposed universal grammar-and then goes OIl to create new
categories based not on their cross-linguistic applicability or on their psy
chological plausibility, but rather on their formal adequacy within the
framework of a speciflc mathematical theory of language. (Thus, when a
formal advance is made in the theory, as in the new minimalism [Chomsky,
199;~1, it is automatically assumed to be a part of universal grammar, with
no empirical verification deemed necessary.) Cognitive-Functional Lilli
gllistics. on the ottwr hand, adopts the categories of traditional Western lin
guistics only tentatively and provisionally based on their correspondence to
the actual patterns of lise of particular people llsing particular languages;
when it creates new categories itjustilles them on the basis of how people in
a particular language, or set of languages. use them in acts of
commnnication.
In the introduction to the first volume, I attempted to give an overview
of CogJlitive-Functional Linguists for psychologists and psycholinguists,
in the hopes that this might provide them with some new perspectives for
basic processes of linguistic communication (Tomasello,
In the more modest introduction to this the second volume, I simply wish
to highlight, and to briefly explore, some of the discoveries-or in some
cases, rediscoveries with modern reformulations-of modern Cognitive
Functional (Usage-Based) Linguistics, with special reference to those that
seem to have most. direct relevance for psychologists. Many of these dis
cO\'eries-or at least the new light in which they are cast in modern Us
age-Based theories-will be surprising to psychologists and psycholil
guists who have not kept up with recent research on such things as
grammatical analyses of non-Indo-European languages, grammaticali
zatiol1 in language history, the relation between written and spoken lan
guage, and the relation between language and human cognition and so
cial interaction. In my opinion, a serious consideration of these new facts
about. language could change fundamentally the way psychologists and
psycholinguists go about their business.

INTRODUCTION

:1

Spoken Language Does Not Work Like Written Language

Everyone agrees that the primary foclis of Linguistics, and (l
Psycholinguistics, should he spoken language. Spoken lallgllage was 1>1i
malY by many tens of thousands of years ill h llman history. alld indccd. llll
til quite recently, the majority of human beings on the
a written language at all. Today, spoken language is still
years in individual ontogeny, and the struggles 01 lllallY childl
III
learning to read-as compared with the relative ease with which
I(alll
to speak-attests to the "unnaturalness" of written language.
The problem is that learning to use a wriUell language-Ilot 10 llWlltioll
metalinguistic skills for talking about it, as ill "Western grallllll,\1
schools-profoundly influences the way ,,'e think about language" Olsou
1994, pp. 258-2(5) argued this poin t forcefully in a series of
some of which are: (a) Writing was responsible historically lill'
pecL~ of spoken language into consciolls awareness, that is, lor
peeL'> of language into object" of reflection, analysis, and design; (I 1'\0
writing system brings all aspects of what is said in spokcll language illlO
awareness, and those aspect" of spoken language thal are nol rcprcsclllnl
written language are extremely difficult to bring into c()n.~('i()usllcSS; and
Those aspects of spoken language represented by writtell language arc
felt by individuals, erroneously, to be a complete model of languagc. ,llld
once this model has been internalized, it is extremely di!ficuh to llllthil1k il
and look at spoken language "naively."
The way to deal with this problem, of course, is to focus \lot Oil
matical sentences" found introspectively-as is commou ill milch of Lill
guistics-but rather to actually observe, record. and analy/.c spontallcOllS
spoken speech
Ford, Fox, & Thompson, this volullle). This is llot as
easy as it sounds, and indeed it is only with the inventioll of al]fmlahlc re
cording equipment (and resources for paying transcribers) that it has 1)("_
corne a possibility at all. With the invention of cOIllputational lools for tagand searching transcripts of spoken language. a whole lIew world 01
corpus linguistics is opening up that allows for Ihe analysis of d("(,ClIl-"i/{d
corpuses that represent what people aetnally do when tiln 'Iwak -.g ..
Biber ct aI., 1998; Sinclair, 1991). Here is a partial list of SOllH" of til<' filld
ings that emerge when one looks at spontaneous spoken speech (.'-ISS) ill
comparisons with
There is very little in SSS that conesponds to a "sentence," as many
people discovered when they first read transcripts of the inl(H"lllai COllvns;{
tions of politicians as recorded on the infamous Wateq.~atc tapes. Pcople
speak in "intonation units," which consist of prosodically and semantically

TOMASELLO

coherent stretches of language typically containing only one new piece of

information (DuBois, this volume). These in tonalion lin ils arc lypically
units of one sort or another
NOlIll Phrases, Adpositional
Phrases, Clauses), but only sometimes are they entil'e "sentences" on the
model of written language.
What are often thought of as prototypical utterances in a language ac
tually are not. For installce, uttel'ances like the English ']ohn bought a mo
" in which there arc full HOUIlS (i.e., noun phrases) designating
both of the main participants, are extremely rare in SSS (but reasonably fre
quent in writing). In SSS, what people prefer to do mostly is to introduce
the main referent in one intonation unit, and then predicate something
about it in another (often using a pronominal reference to the just intro
duced entity), as in: "hey ... y<1 know that guyJohn ... down at the poolhall
., . he bought a Harley ... if you can believe that." (Chafe, 1994,1998).
What are thought of as the prototypical lISCS of ceI'lain linguistic con
structions often are not. For example, textbooks tell us that English relative
clauses serve to "restrict" reference, as in "The motorcycle that he bought
uses diesel fuel," and they often do do this ill writing. But, it turilS out, in
SSS people very seldom use a relative clause to restrict the refer
ence of the primary participant (subject), which, as noted previously, is
most often a pnmoun. Also, people seldom use the word thaI to introduce a
relative clause in SSS. This leads once again to more natural utterances like
"ya know that motorcycle he bought .... [it uses diesell" (Fox & Thomp
son, I
Utterances high in transitivity (an agellt does something to cause a
change of state in a patient), which are oftcn used as thc prototype of a sen
tence in mallY languages, arc not so frequent in SSS. In one analysis,
Thompson and Hopper (in pl'ess) fmllid that only about one quarter of the
clausal intonation units ill SSS had two pal'ticipan IS, and many of these were
low in transitivity (primary participant not very agentive or secondary par
ticipan t did not undergo change of state). There were also lIlany QiSF~n.~,l
verbal predicates instead of
lexical verbs (e.f:5., have a hard timp
go to allthp trouble 0/ V-ing, wander around
etc.).
When one systematically compares stich things as noun phrases, subor
dinate clauses of all types, focus constructions of all types, and many others,
one finds that SSS and written language are very different grammatically
(Miller & Weinert, 1998). Many constructions occllr ollly or mainly in
speech, for example, imperatives and interrogatives, or only in writing, for
example, some types of complex nominals (e.g., "a rigorous and valid ex
amination of Applied Economics that consists of three papers"), hut not in
both.

INTRODU< :nON

These are enough examples to make the point. The reallhillg-spollta

neow; spoken speech-has properties of it.s own that are dilkrcllt, in SOlIW
cases very dillcl'ent, from the intuitive model oflanguagc til"t literate, Cd!l
cated people carry around in their heads. This internalized 1II0dd llIay of
course be used to generate hypotheses about the structure of SSS, blll the
bct is that SSS must he studied in its own right, by the normal processes 01
scientific observation and experimentation, however ditIindt and
this may be.

Grammar Arises Historically From Language Use

Although it is not well known in the Cognitive Science COl1l 111 II 11 it\', lite lact
is that virtually all linguists who are involved in the detailed analysis of indi
vidual languages cross-linguistically-mostly known as lingnistic
now agree that there are vel)' few if any specitic grammatical consll'uniol1s or
markers that are universally present in all lanf:5uages, There are mallY lall
guages that simply do not have one or the other of n~lati\'(' clauses,
sentential complements, passive ('oBstructions, grammatical markers fell'
tense, grammatical markers of evidentiality, ditransitives, topic markers, ({
wjJUla (to be), case mal'king of grammatical roles, subjullctive llIood, defi
nite and indefinite articles, incorporated nouns, plural mark<'rs, and Oil
and on. Typological research has also established beyond a rc,!sonahlc
doubt that not only are specific grammatical constructions no! ullin'lsa!.
but hasically none of the so-called minor word classes or English th,\! help
to constitute particular ('onstructions (e.g., prepositiolls. <!uxi\ian v('r\)s,
articles, adverhs, compiemcntizers, LlIld the

sal across languages either (Croft, in press; Dryer, I

This does not mean that there are no language universals-there dc

monstrably are-but only that we must look for those ulliv(Tsals ill
besides particular linguistic items and constructions. Olle place to look is
human cognition, and of course that is one of the central tCllets of (
live Linguistics. Talmy (this volume) ontlines foUl' "concept structllrillg ~y,,_
terns" that, by hypothesis, underlie all languages. Thus, all IIll/lla1l
conceptualize the world in terms of certain configurations or space ami
time, force dynamics and causality, perspective and attentiol1al distribu
tion; and so languages, as conventional symbolic systems design cd to C()lll
municate about this world, obviously reflect these uH1ceptllaliz;tti()lIs as
well. Kemmer (this volume) analyzes how many difIcrellt iangmigcs COll
strue events and elaborate their participants, proposing a llllivcrsal eH~l1t
model that then different languages instantiate differently ill their various
constructions. Haspelmath (this volume) illustral('s graphicallv sornc oj i1lC

TOMASELLO

interesting and complex ways in which universal forms of conceptualization

get symbolized into languages cross-linguistically, with both some universal
patterns and also a healthy dose of language-specific idiosyncrasies. An
other place to look for universals is human communication in the sense of
the communicative goals and needs of human beings-some of which are
universal and some of which are particular to particular speech communi
ties. Comrie (this volume) outlines some possible linguistic universals due
to the kinds of things that humans need to talk about most urgently and the
ways they need to talk about them in order to avoid ambiguities and achieve
their communicative goals.
If grammatical items and constructions are not universally given to hu
man beings, then where do they come from? Beginning in the last century,
historical linguists have observed that many grammatical items in a lan
guage seem to come from more contentfullexical items. Some of the best
known European examples are as follows:
The main future tense marker in English comes from the full lexical
verb will, as in I will it to hapjJen. At some point expressions arose of the
form It'll happen (with the volitional component of will "bleached"
out). Similarly, the original use of go was for movement (I'm going to the
SlOTI') and this became I'm gonna do it tomorrow (with the movement
bleached out).
The English past perfective, using have, is very likely derived from sen
tences such as I have afinger broken or I have the prisoners bound (in which
have is a verb of possession). This evolved into something like I have bro
ken afinger (in which the possession meaning of have is bleached out).
English phrases snch as on the top of and in the side of evolved into on top
of and inside of and eventually into atop and inside. In some languages
relator words such as these spatial prepositions may also become at
tached to nouns as case markers (although not in English)-in this in
stance as possible locative case markers.
In French, the main negative is the expression ne . .. pas, as in Je ne sais
~. Currently in spoken French, the ne is becoming less often used and
jiaS is becoming the main negative marker. But the word pas was at one
point the word for "step," with the expression being something like the
English "not one bit" or "not one step further."
In addition, larger constructions themselves are producLs of grammat
icalization processes, albeit these processes may be somewhat different and
so they have been called syntactitization (Givan, 1979, 1995). The basic idea is
that instead of sequences of words becoming one word, or a word changing

INTRODUCTION

from a more referential to a more grammatical fllnction, or a word tllmillg

into a grammatical morpheme, in this case whole phrases takc ()Il a lICW kind
of organization; that is, loose discourse sequences, often acr()ss illton;lti()1l
units, become tighter syntactic constructions. SOllie possible examples:
Loose discourse sequences such as Hf jmlleri Ihe door find il o/JI'III'I/llIav
become syntacticized into Hf tmlled tlte door o/JI'TI (<I resultativt' COllstruc
tion).
Loose discourse sequences such as AI, /JoJ/i"il'lld ... 1/(' /J/I/XI /Jilli/{) ...
lie jJlays in a band. may become My bOY/rifllll filays /Jim/{) ill 1/ I}(II/d. Or,
similarly, My boyfriend . .. He rid!!s hOTSes ... HI' lifts Oil tlifill. Illay bccolllc
My boyfrimd, who riries hones, bets on thl'lli.
Similarly, if someone expresses the belief that Mary will wcdjollll, an
other person might respond with an assent I bdil've Ihlll, /(lilowcil iJy a
repetition of the expressed belief that A1a') will wed ./111111, which iJc
come syntacticized into the single statement I bdielll' Ihlll Mill)' lIIil1l1li'd
John.
Complex sentences may also derive from discourse sequcllces or ini
tially separate utterances, as in I wanl it . .. I buy il. enllving into! wllnl
to bny it.
Interestingly, along with plenty of idiosyncratic gralllllIaticali;ratioll
paths in individual languages, there would seem to be some lllliver~al, ()r
nearly universal, grammaticalization and syntactitizatioll paths as \\'ell.
Among the most widely attested arc such things as (a) main verb ~ auxil
iary verb ~ tense-aspect-mood marker (e.g., a process begun hy Ellgli,h will
[future] and have [perfective]); (b) demonstrative ~ definite article (e.g.,
English the from that); (c) the numeral "one" ~ indefinite article (Spalli.~h
uno/a, French un, English a); and (el) demonstrative ~ cOllIplemcnti/.(T
(e.g., in English I know that ~ I know that shl'\ ("()lIIing). These h;q>pen scpa
rately in separate languages, presumably attesting to commoll processes of
change based on universal principles of human cognitioll and lillgllistic
communication (Croft, 2(00).
Bybee (this volume) proposes some specific explanations for these (Olll
mon grammaticalization paths in terms of cognitive and connnllnicati\e
processes well known to psychologists, such as automatization, habituation,
decontextualization (emancipation), categorization, pragmatic inflTt'lJ(
ing, and others. These processes occur as individuals use pieces of language
in communication over time, with speakers cOllstantly trying to say no lllorc
than is necessary and listeners trying to make sure that speakers say enough
that they can understand adequately the intended message. Van Hoek (this

TOMASELLO

certain processes of reference and anaphora across

clauses and intonation units operate the way they do in lan~llage. Her ex
focuses on the way people package their conceptualizations for
purposes of interpersonal communication.
The Units of Language Are Many and Various
and Do Not Constitute "A Grammar"

INTRODliCTION

Subsequent studies on various other "odd" cOllstruction, haq' tllrlwd up

many other similar examples, most famously:
the nominal extraposltlOn construction (Michaeli~ ,II..: 1.;ulIlmcht,
19~j6), as in It's am.azinf! the !JeotJuJ wmlt/.I'I'l lint'.
the WXDY construction
, as in \1//1111 '11/11'1/,11''' dlJ
, as in fie smikd /ii.1

Wll)' il/lo

!I/(,

In traditional Western linguistics we speak of "The Grammar" of a lan

guage, and Chomsky has followed in this tradition
speaking of children
with "A Grammar." But languages as they are really spoken and
of "The Grammar" of a lan
guage as a coherent entity many interesting strnctures must simply be ig
nored. For example, it is well known that in mlditionalterms English is an
SVO (Subject-Verb-O~ject) language; su~jects typically precede the verb
and agree with it in number. Thus we say:
She play~ the piano.
They piaL the piano.

this way
There ~ my shoe.
There are mv shoes.

we say:
Here is my shoe.
Here are my shoes.

In this case, it is the element following the verb that agrees with it in num
ber and so is, by that criterion, its subject. (Making matters even more com
plicated, the ,"cry similar looking utterance It is m~ shoe does not also have
the f(mn *It art' m.'1 .Ihoes.) It is also well known that many so-called ergative
languages have ergative organization in, for example, first and second per
son utterances, but acclisative organization in third person ul.lerances
can also be split
based on tense; DeLancey, 1981).
is that different constructions in a language often have their
own !(1IOsyncratic properties that do not lit neatly into the rules of "The
Grammar." Fillmore, Kay, and O'Conner in their famous 1988 paper in
Language (reprinted in abridged form in this volume) explore some of the
many and various idiosyncratic constructions of English, focusing especially
on the construction exemplified in utterances such as She wouldn '{ Ziv' in
New YOTh, much less Boston. vVhereas it was always known that all languages
have some idioms, metaphors, proverbs, and quirky constructions, what
this paper underlines is the fact that many constnlctions in a language are
in fact mixtur"es of more "rellular" and more "idiomat.ic" subconstructions.

constructioll (JackendofL 19~JI;). as ill f II' \

caref''' awa_'1.
the -el" construction, as in Th' Tilher lhl')' IIrl', thl' nirl'l IIII'\' rill'.

the incredulity construction, as in Him bl' a dor/or!

These constrtlctions are notjnst totally weird idioms, but rarhn tlin repre
sent complex mixtures of regular and idiomatic componen Is, and so in t 1;1
ditional Linguist.ics it is difficult to know what to do with th(,1I1.
The theoretical move in traditional as well as CllOl1lskian lillguistic,", has
always been to simply designate some items and constrlluiollS or a bll
are then
to tlie lexicoll.
has been most clearly instantiated in CholllskY's ( 19HO) dis
tinction between the Core and the Periphery in The Grall1l1lal or a lall
guage. More recently, it is also evident in the vVords and Rliks approaclI
of Pinker (1999) and Clahsen (\999), in which all irregular asp('ch or a
language are in the lexicon-and so must be learned by rote-wlicr("ls all
the regular aspects of a language are a part of its grammaJ" ;lIId ~() Edl ulI
der a rule that then generates its structural description. The plOhlt-lII
again is that this tidy distinction is very diflindt to maintain ill tlw bee or
mixed constructions such as those listed, in which it is al1llost
lO segregate the regular and idiomatic aspens. To look 1l1OIC
one example, the incredulity construction (Alv rnalhn rid!' II
can generale !lew exIn some ways it is like other English (OIl:'itlllctioIlS
(e.g., it has SVO ordering, the NPs are regular), but of cour..,(" til(' S is
marked as an o~ject pronoun (accusative case) and the verb is Ilollfillite
(not marked for agreemell t). And so the question is: Is tli is a II!Ic-b~lscd
construction or an idiom? If it is an idiom, it mllst be called ,I prodllcti\('
idiom. The problem is that there are thousands and thousands ofpro<illc
tive idioms in a language that are regular and idiomatic in myriad fliifn
ent ways-so that they merge into more n.:gular constructiO!lS with 110
clear break (Nunberg,
& Wasow,
The discovery-perhaps best credited to Bolinger (I
but dlle
to the work of Fillmore, Kay, and colleagues-is that there is no deal" dis
tinction between the "core" and the "DeI"iDhclv" of a bm.rIl:HT{' and this llll

10

TOMASEI J'()

dermines the whole idea of The Grammar of a language as a clearly defined

set of rules. It is interesting and important that when linguists who have
worked for years ill the Cholllskiall tradition look Gu-efully at particular
grammatical items and constructions, they find that many of them that
were at one time considered members of the same categOlY (e.g., comple
mentizer) or construction (e.g., complement clause) turn Ollt to be very dif:
fcrent from one another in detail-and so not assimilable to the same rigid
rule (Cullicovcr, 1999; Jackendoft, 1996).
The altcrmltive is to conceive of a language as "a structured inventory of
symbolic units," each with its own structure and fllnction (Langacke r ,
1987) _These units may vary in both their complexity and generality. For ex
ample, the Olle word utterance Forf'! is a very simple and concrete construc
tion llsed for a specific fllnction in the game of golf. Thank you and DOll'/
mention il are II1ultiword cOflstrunions used for relatively specific social
functiolls. Some other constructions are composed of specific words along
with "slots" into which whole classes of items llIay fit, for example, Down with
and Hooray jiJr
There arc also constructions that are extremely gen
eral and abstT<lct. Thus, the ditransitive construction in English proto
typically indicates transfer of possession and is represented by utterances
such as lie gave the doctor money, abstractly described as NP+VP+NP+NP. Ab
stTact linguistic constrnctions such as this have their own meanings, ill rela
tive independence of the lexical items involved, and indeed this is the
source of much of the creativity of langlwge (Goldberg, 1995). Abstract
constructions are thus an important part of the inventory of symbolic re
sources that language users control-and they do much of the work that
would be done by core grammar in more traditional accounts-bUl they
are best seen as just one form that linguistic constructions may take.
In genera!, the breakdown or the distinction between linguistic "core"
and linguistic "periphery" is a genuine scientific discovery about the way
language works, and sorting out its implications will playa key role in creat
ing a new psychology oflangllage. V\'hen we conceive of linguistic construc
tions as cognitive schemas of the same type as we tind in other cognitive
skills, that is, as relatively automatized procedures for gettillg things done
(in this case, communicatively), it is quite natural that they should not be of
only two kinds (regular and idiomatic) hut rather that they should valy
from simple to complex and, independently, from concrete to abstract in
many complex ways.

<:

Frequency Counts
Individuals do not hear abstract constructions; they hear only individual IIt
terances. To create abstract constructions, they mllst find patterns in the
language they bear around them. Children begin with constructions based

INTRODU(TIC)N

11

on concrete items and phrases; they then discover ,1 variety or rl'iatlvdv lo

cal constructional patterns; and only laler do tlley discoHT ilIon' gell('ral
patterns among these local constructiollal patterns (Tomasello, 199:2,
2000). But as children create mon~ general constructions, they do lIoi
throwaway their more item-based and local constructions. The ide;1 tl1;11
people operate always and only with the most ahstract structlllcs 111<11 lin
guists can find is what Langacker (1987) called the rulf-lis!jlllfllt). It rl'lkcts
a very deep difference in the theoretical goals or hmKtllilt!Iuists alld IHOIC
psychologically oriented linguists.
In cognirive\y and functionally oriented (usage-hased) appro<lclJ('s, pl'O
pie can possess abstTact cognitive strnctures that they use ill ct'rt;lill ill
stances, but they still operate on some occasions with the 1II0le COIHT('\C
structures that instantiate the abstraction. Asjust a handftd !if llI;lllY thou
sands, or tens of thousands, of relatively cOllcrete alld fixed expressiolls
that native speakers of English control (which mayor lll<l) Hot i IIst,lIlt I;It(
more abstract constructions): I'm siml)ly amazed, / loo/m{ rtlPl)'whflf'lOI iI. rOil
k.ef'P out of this, That was a dose mlf, It'.s a moltn Ii/priorilil's. Jcinlll lillll' lolilll(,
... , I'd do il all otW! again, I'm surprisl'd to /tnti' thai, Do w/zal.)'III( ./(, lold.', / .\1'1'
whalyou mean, f thought you'd Tlevf,. ask, I fav!' .1(!IIlf 1/10/1'. You ((/11 '11w IIII!
IVhere did you find it?, He', bus,'Y right now, rou mil 't belil'1..l1' 1/ wllrd II(' \In.l. a II d
on and on (Pawley & Syder, 1983).
Bybee and Scheibman (1999) provided evidence that peopk SOllll'llIlH'S
produce complex utterances-which they know at sume level have illtcnlal
structure-as single processing unit~. They analyze in some depth nrio(!s
Ilses of the English word don't and find thaI in highly frequellt and 1'(:1;1
tively fixed expression like 1 don 'f know people lend 10 red lice the
ation of don 'I, in some cases so rmlCh thaI it IS harelv recoglliza!)le ir Jj>(,II('d
to in isolation. Thus, the most common pronullciation of / dOIl'1 1111070 is ac
tually something more like ldunno, and in some cases the C'xpressioll is
barely more than a characteristic intonation contour. This salllc )"edUC"lioll
or the word don't does not occur in other, less frequent exprC'iSiOllS and
constructions. Although most adults can allalyze this expressioll illto it-;
components-for {~xample, if a questionel- persists they call say each or tht'
words slowly and emphatically, "I ... DON'T. , . KNOW!"-b'Olll a proct",
ing point of view its great frequency has made it a productioll rowil1c.
Bybee (1995) argued thaI the token frequency of an expressioll MT\,(', to
entrench it in a speaker's repertoire and make it a processing \lllii.
frequency-repeated instantiations of the same pallern bll! with diff(T('1I1
concrete items-entrenches the pattern but also, at the same lilllt', makes il
more generally applicable to more items. Thus, young childrcll ill
form and use only very concrete and local construclional islallds (based Oil
specific lexical items) but with high type freqnency in one or 11101(' .,Iol'i. for
example: VVhere's (hr' X?, / wanna X, Mort' X, It:\ (J X, I'm X-inJ!: ii, Put X 111'1(',

12

T()MASEI,LO

Mommy ~~
it, [.et's X it, Throw X, X gone, I X-ed it, Sit on the X,
see
here, Then<s a X, X broken (Braine, 1976; Lieven, Pine, & Baldwin,
Tomasello, 2000, for a review of the evidence).
Frequency also plavs a crucial role in grammaticalization and language
Thus, it is well known that the linguistic constructions that are most
resistant to change al'(~ those that are most fn~qllent. That is why most ilTeg
ular verbs in a language are typically highly frequent (e.g., in English the
verbs to he and to have). Bybee and Thompson (in press) analyzed the exam
ple of the subjunctive mood in Canadian French, which has basically been
lost. However, in a few highly frequent fixed expressions it lives on (as it
also does in frequent English expressions like "If I were you. . . .
At the
same lime, highly frequent expressions also in some contexts become
grammaticalized, and so changt' their function, sometimes retaining the
old hmction in otht'r contexts (as in the English main verbs have and goand
their more recent instantiations as auxiliary verbs as well). In the context of
language acquisition, Brooks, Tomasello, Lewis, and Dodson (1999) ar
gued and presented evidence thai the entrenchmenl of particular verbs in
particular constructions (in both comprehension and prodllction) is a rnaCIctor preventing children from overgeneralizing their abstract con
structions 10 inappropriate verbs. This finding (in combination with that of
Brooks & Tomasello, 1999, who demonstrated the importance of two other
usage-based f~lctors) thus solves in large measure the puzzle of why children
grammatical rules indiscriminately with their en
be expected to if they possessed the abstract
tire
Pinker,
ruics that formal grammar writers often attribute to them

1984,
and entrenchment raises the specter of Behaviorism,
which, as is well known, was exorcised from Linguistics once and for all by
Chomsky (19,1)9). Butjust because frequency and entrenchment were im
portant concepts for behaviorists-who knew little of the structure of lan
guage-does not mean that they are useless in other, more cognitively and
sophisticated approaches, It turns out that both the type and
token frequency with which particular constructions are used makes an
enormous difference both in their historical f~lte and ill the way they are un
derstood, acquired, cognitively represented, and used by contemporary
speakers of a languagt'.

CONCLUSION
Linguistics as a discipline hovers between the Humanities and the Behav
ioral/Cognitive Sciences. For much of it'; history Linguistics consisted
solely of the analysis of texts and the teaching of rules, Many linQ'uists thus

INTROIllI( :nON

13

did not consider it their concern to worry about psvcilOiogicall('<tlily, or to

acquire expertise with the kinds of rigorons methods of dat~l
statistical analysis that are the fOllndation (lIthe Heitavioral/(
cllces. But, with t.he rise of Cognitive Science as an
prise, with the rise of new technolog-ies that make possihle the
and analysis of real live linguistic communication. and wil h 111<' li'iC or (
nitive-Functional (Usage-Based) approaches to ling-uistic IlH'my, tile bal
ance is beginning to tip toward the side ofsciencc. In a ut()pi~ll1 llllllit', lin
guists and psYtchologists will work togetlrer to investigate the a<tu~tl
psychological processes by means of which human being's ('(
produce, and acquire a natLIrallangliage, The chapters ill Ihis VOlllIlH'-<lS
well as those in the first volume-represent theoretical approaches Ihal \\ill
help us to make progress IowaI'd thai goal.

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