Usage-based models of language are linguistic approaches within a broader functional or cognitive framework that emerged in the late 1980s. These models assume a profound relationship between linguistic structure and usage.
History The term "usage-based" was first coined by Ronald Langacker in 1987. Usage-based models of language have become a significant trend in linguistics since the early 2000s. Influential proponents of usage-based linguistics include Michael Tomasello, Joan Bybee and Morten Christiansen.
Difference from formal models Notably, usage-based models challenge the dominant focus of 20th century linguistics away from formalism-generativism, since it considers language as an isolated system removed from its use in human interaction and cognition. Instead, usage-based models propose that linguistic information is expressed via context-sensitive mental processing and mental representations, which have the cognitive ability to succinctly account for the complexity of actual language use at all levels (phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax, pragmatics and semantics). Broadly speaking, a usage-based model of language accounts for language acquisition and processing, synchronic and diachronic patterns, and both low-level and high-level structure in language by looking at actual language use. Together with related approaches, such as construction grammar, emergent grammar, and language as a complex adaptive system, usage-based linguistics belongs to the wider framework of evolutionary linguistics. It studies the lifespan of linguistic units (e.g. words, suffixes), arguing that they can survive language change through frequent usage or by participating in usage-based generalizations if their syntactic, semantic or pragmatic features overlap with other similar constructions. There is disagreement as to whether the approach is different from memetics or essentially the same.
Disciplinary roots West coast cognitive functionalism West Coast cognitive functionalism (WCCF) played a major role in the creation of the usage-based enterprise. Firstly, a crucial point in WCCF was Eleanor Rosch’s paper on semantic categories in human cognition, which studied fuzzy semantic categories with central and peripheral concepts. Subsequently, Robin Lakoff (1987) applied these concepts to linguistic studies. For usage-based models of language, these discoveries legitimized interest in the peripheral phenomena and inspired the examination of the ontological status of the rules themselves. Secondly, WCCF focuses on the effects of social/ textual context and cognitive processes on human thought, instead of established systems and representations, which motivated the study of external sources in usage-based language research. For example, in analyzing the differences between the grammatical notions of subject vs. topic, Li and Thompson (1976), found that the repetition of certain topics by a speech community resulted in the surfacing and crystallization of formal properties into syntactic entities, namely the subject. This notion of syntax and morphology being an outcome of pragmatic and cognitive factors was influential in the development of usage-based models. Thirdly, the WCCF methodology of linguistic typology is similarly practised in usage-based models, in collecting data from real communicative contexts and analyzing them for typological regularities. This highlights an important aspect of usage-based research, the study of methods for the integration of synchrony and diachrony. Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar The term ‘usage-based’ was coined by Ronald Langacker in 1987, while doing research on Cognitive Grammar. Langacker identified commonly recurring linguistic patterns (patterns such as those associated with Wh- fronting, subject-verb agreement, the use of present participles, etc.) and represented these supposed rule-governed behaviours on a hierarchical structure. The Cognitive Grammar model represented grammar, semantics and lexicon as associated processes that were laid on a continuum, which provided a theoretical framework that was significant in studying the usage-based conception of language. Consequently, a usage-based model accounts for these rule-governed language behaviours by providing a representational scheme that is entirely instance-based, and able to recognize and uniquely represent each familiar pattern, which occurs with varying strengths at different instances. His usage-based model draws on the cognitive psychology of schemata, which are flexible hierarchical structures that are able to accommodate the complexity of mental stimuli. Similarly, as humans perceive linguistic abstractions as multilayered, ranging from patterns that occur across whole utterances to those that occur in phonetic material, the usage-based model acknowledges the differing levels of granularity in speakers’ knowledge of their language. Langacker's work emphasizes that both abstract structure and instance-based detail are contained in language, differing in granularity but not in basic principles. Bybee's Dynamic Usage-based framework Bybee’s work greatly inspired the creation of usage-based models of language. Bybee’s model makes predictions about and explains synchronic, diachronic and typological patterns within languages, such as which variants will occur in which contexts, what forms they will take, and about their diachronic consequences. Using the linguistic phenomenon of splits (when a word starts to show subtle polysemy, and morphological possibilities for the originally single form ensue), Bybee proves that even irreducibly irregular word-forms are seen to be non-arbitrary when the context it occurs in is taken into consideration in the very representation of morphology. Simultaneously, she shows that even seemingly regular allomorphy is context-sensitive. Splits also aligns with the idea that linguistic forms cannot be studied as isolated entities, but rather in relation to the strength of their attachment to other entities.
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