Usaged-based approaches to language have gained great popularity in a variety of domains, including theoretical linguistics, natural language processing, child language acquisition, and computer modeling. The evidence that language knowledge and language use are extremely sensitive to the fine details of experience is quite persuasive.
Nonetheless, there are a number of important questions and outstanding problems to be considered: (1) What form does this knowledge take? Do language users literally record their experience in some numerical form? How do we explain abstraction and generalization beyond literal experience? (2) How closely should we expect that language processing is predicted by the statistics of usage as estimated from large-scale corpora? If there are significant divergences, how are they to be accounted for? (3) There is reason to believe that language experience changes significantly over time, from the first years of life to adulthood. How does this fact enter into usage-based theories?
These questions will be the focus of my talk. I shall argue in favor
of usage-based language knowledge, but I shall also argue for the
importance of models of learning. Language behavior reflects
experience, but only insofar as that experience is the input to
processes of induction, rather than recapitulating that experience
verbatim.