Resumo de What Is Usage-Based Linguistics?
This chapter begins with a brief history of western linguistics in the twentieth century, demonstrating how various strands of linguistic research came to be united under the heading of Usage-Based Theory. It addresses the sources of explanation in Usage-Based Theory. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the dominant framework for linguistics in the United States was a structuralist approach aimed at providing language description. In contrast to the premise of structural linguistics that memory representations contain only contrastive information, Usage-Based Theory embraces the premise that memory for language has the same properties as memory for other experiences. The acknowledgment of the role of frequency of use in the acquisition, creation, and change of linguistic structure is often taken to be the defining characteristic of a usage-based approach. A fundamental issue for Usage-Based Theory is the need to clarify the relationship between experience and grammar.
