Resumen de The Role of Frequency in Morphosyntactic Variation
Usage-based approaches to variation examine speakers' language production in order to make empirically-based inferences about their cognitive representations of language. This chapter examines specific cases of morphosyntactic variation in Spanish and Portuguese as a window into the myriad ways that frequency, in interaction with other conditioning factors, probabilistically conditions speaker choice of forms. It provides an overview of functionalist approaches, with particular attention paid to the role of frequency, beginning with phonetic/phonological variation and moving toward morphosyntax. Subject pronoun expression is one of the most extensively studied cases of morphosyntactic variation in Spanish. The chapter explores usage-based approaches that employ various frequency measures more fully through a review of several loci of variation in the verbal and pronominal domains. Usage-based approaches that seriously consider grammar as accumulated linguistic experience are increasingly well represented in journals and at conferences dedicated to language use and change.
