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Frequency and serial order

  • Thomas Berg EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: November 3, 2018

Abstract

Previous work on frequency has in the main focused on paradigmatic aspects such as irregularity and allomorphy. This study, in contrast, addresses the syntagmatic dimension and in particular examines the effect of token frequency on serial order. A simple prediction follows from the psycholinguistic observation that frequency facilitates the retrieval of linguistic units: frequent units should precede infrequent ones rather than vice versa in the linear representation of speech. This prediction is tested on a total of fourteen phenomena from various languages and found to receive wide support in the domain of word order. However, it exerts only a sporadic influence on morpheme order and apparently no influence on phoneme order. Frequency is argued to be a cost-free, explanatory and pervasive, albeit a relatively weak factor. It is most likely to manifest itself in areas where alternative ordering options are available which are also semantically similar. Frequency may accompany linguistic change through its various stages.

Acknowledgements

This article is based on a lecture I was fortunate to give at the University of Geneva in October 2015. I cannot thank enough the following people who have contributed significantly to this project: Marion Neubauer for her data collection efforts and her close reading, André Geisler for his extensive frequency analyses, Martin Schweinberger for his R tutorials, Arne Lohmann for his comments on the first version and above all the Linguistics reviewers whose highly insightful reports have led me to publish a paper which makes more modest but hopefully sounder claims.

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Published Online: 2018-11-03
Published in Print: 2018-11-27

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