Corpus frequency: a convenient shortcut to prototypicality?
(2006) Meeting of the Association Belge de Linguistique Appliquée (ABLA) — Location: Brussels (10.March.2006)
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- Abstract
- After originating in the field of psychology, the concept of prototypicality was applied to linguistic domains of investigation. During this transfer, however, the concept seems to have lost much of its empirical grounding. In fact, Kentta (2005) shows that most of the prototypes described in the linguistic literature are established by means of intuition. The only empirical evidence that is sometimes produced is the frequency of the linguistic phenomenon as attested in corpus data. But while linguistic frequency and cognitive salience have regularly been associated (see, for example, Schmid’s [2000] “From-Corpus-to-Cognition Principle”), the link between them is still very much hypothetical. The study presented here aims to determine the prototype of two highly polysemous verbs, give and take, and compares the frequency of the different senses of the verbs in a corpus of spoken English with the results of an online sentence production experiment. It is demonstrated that frequency in language does not necessarily reflect what is salient in the mind.
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Citations
Gilquin, G. (2006). Corpus frequency: a convenient shortcut to prototypicality? Meeting of the Association Belge de Linguistique Appliquée (ABLA), Brussels. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/225741