Frequency and morphological complexity in variation

Glossa: a journal of general linguistics

Authors

Ruaridh Purse

Josef Fruehwald

Meredith Tamminga

Published

2022

Doi

10.16995/glossa.5839

Abstract

Broad interest in probabilistic aspects of language has reignited debates about a potential delineation between the shape of an abstract grammar and patterns of language in use. A central topic in this debate is the relationship between measures capturing aspects of language use, such as word frequency, and patterns of variation. While it has become common practice to attend to frequency measures in studies of linguistic variation, fundamental questions about exactly what linguistic unit’s frequency it is appropriate to measure in each case, and what this implies about the representations or processing mechanisms at play, remain underexplored. In the present study, we compare how three frequency measures account for variance in Coronal Stop Deletion (CSD) based on large-scale corpus data from Philadelphia English: whole-word frequency, stem frequency, and conditional (whole-word/stem) frequency. While there is an effect of all three measures on CSD outcomes in monomorphemes, the effect of conditional frequency is by far the most robust. Furthermore, only conditional frequency has an effect on CSD rates in -ed suffixed words. Thus, we suggest that frequency effects in CSD are best interpreted in terms of stem-conditional predictability of a suffix or word-edge. These results lend support to the importance of asking these fundamental questions about usage measures, and suggest that contemporary approaches to frequency should take morphological complexity into account.

Citation

BibTeX citation:

@article{purse2022,
  author = {Purse, Ruaridh and Fruehwald, Josef and Tamminga, Meredith},
  title = {Frequency and Morphological Complexity in Variation},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  volume = {7},
  number = {1},
  date = {2022-09-29},
  url = {https://www.glossa-journal.org/article/id/5839/},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.5839},
  langid = {en},
  abstract = {Broad interest in probabilistic aspects of language has
    reignited debates about a potential delineation between the shape of
    an abstract grammar and patterns of language in use. A central topic
    in this debate is the relationship between measures capturing
    aspects of language use, such as word frequency, and patterns of
    variation. While it has become common practice to attend to
    frequency measures in studies of linguistic variation, fundamental
    questions about exactly what linguistic unit’s frequency it is
    appropriate to measure in each case, and what this implies about the
    representations or processing mechanisms at play, remain
    underexplored. In the present study, we compare how three frequency
    measures account for variance in Coronal Stop Deletion (CSD) based
    on large-scale corpus data from Philadelphia English: whole-word
    frequency, stem frequency, and conditional (whole-word/stem)
    frequency. While there is an effect of all three measures on CSD
    outcomes in monomorphemes, the effect of conditional frequency is by
    far the most robust. Furthermore, only conditional frequency has an
    effect on CSD rates in -ed suffixed words. Thus, we suggest that
    frequency effects in CSD are best interpreted in terms of
    stem-conditional predictability of a suffix or word-edge. These
    results lend support to the importance of asking these fundamental
    questions about usage measures, and suggest that contemporary
    approaches to frequency should take morphological complexity into
    account.}
}

For attribution, please cite this work as:

Purse, Ruaridh, Josef Fruehwald, and Meredith Tamminga. 2022. “Frequency and Morphological Complexity in Variation.” Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 7 (1). https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5839.