This book is a comprehensive introduction to the statistical analysis of word frequency distributions, intended for computational linguists, corpus linguists, psycholinguists, and researchers in the field of quantitative stylistics. It aims to make these techniques more accessible for non-specialists, both theoretically, by means of a careful introduction to the underlying probabilistic and statistical concepts, and practically, by providing a program library implementing the main models for word frequency distributions.

This volume collects three decades of articles by the distinguished linguist Joan Bybee. Her articles essentially argue for the importance off frequency of use as a factor in the analysis and explanation of language structure. Her work has been very influential for a broad range of researchers in linguistics, particularly in discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, phonology, phonetics, and historical linguistics.

Re-examines frequency, entrenchment and salience, three foundational concepts in usage-based linguistics, through the prism of learning, memory, and attention.

The view of exemplar-based second language learning emphasizes the importance of frequency in learning grammar. According to this view, type frequency rather than token frequency contributes to learning generalized knowledge beyond item-based constructions. This book investigates how frequency in experiencing exemplars affects the learning of the English primary verb be by junior high school students in Japan. The study consists of a quasi-experiment and stimulated-recall analysis of the data. The quasi-experiment compares three kinds of output practice: practice with increased type frequency, practice with increased token frequency, and practice without increased frequency. The experiment also explores how the frequency effects relate to the extent of explicit knowledge about the target structures. In the stimulated-recall analysis, learners engaging in the type frequency practice and those engaging in the token frequency practice are compared in terms of thought processes employed while practicing. The book discusses how frequency promotes classroom second language learning by taking the role of awareness of form-meaning connections into consideration.

A mainstay of functional linguistics has been the claim that linguistic elements and patterns that are frequently used in discourse become conventionalized as grammar. This book addresses the two issues that are basic to this claim: first, the question of what types of elements are frequently used in discourse and second, the question of how frequency of use affects cognitive representations. Reporting on evidence from natural conversation, diachronic change, variability, child language acquisition and psycholinguistic experimentation the original articles in this book support two major principles. First, the content of people’s interactions consists of a preponderance of subjective, evaluative statements, dominated by the use of pronouns, copulas and intransitive clauses. Second, the frequency with which certain items and strings of items are used has a profound influence on the way language is broken up into chunks in memory storage, the way such chunks are related to other stored material and the ease with which they are accessed to produce new utterances.

Time-frequency analysis is a modern branch of harmonic analysis. It com prises all those parts of mathematics and its applications that use the struc ture of translations and modulations (or time-frequency shifts) for the anal ysis of functions and operators. Time-frequency analysis is a form of local Fourier analysis that treats time and frequency simultaneously and sym metrically. My goal is a systematic exposition of the foundations of time-frequency analysis, whence the title of the book. The topics range from the elemen tary theory of the short-time Fourier transform and classical results about the Wigner distribution via the recent theory of Gabor frames to quantita tive methods in time-frequency analysis and the theory of pseudodifferential operators. This book is motivated by applications in signal analysis and quantum mechanics, but it is not about these applications. The main ori entation is toward the detailed mathematical investigation of the rich and elegant structures underlying time-frequency analysis. Time-frequency analysis originates in the early development of quantum mechanics by H. Weyl, E. Wigner, and J. von Neumann around 1930, and in the theoretical foundation of information theory and signal analysis by D.

First published in 2010 . Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.