This title addresses the question of what types of elements are frequently used in discourse, and how frequency of use affects cognitive representations. It reports on evidence from natural conversation, diachronic change, variability, child language acquisition and psycholinguistic experimentation. The title also supports two major principles - firstly, the content of people's interactions consists of a preponderance of subjective, evaluative statements, dominated by the use of pronouns, copulas and intransitive clauses. Secondly, 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 statements.
My books report on my research in the academic discipline of Linguistics. I've been particularly interested in the cognitive processes that apply when people use language and how these processes create change in language over long periods of time. One of my interests has been to investigate the way the frequency of use of particular words or phrases impacts the representation of these words or phrases in memory. An important finding is that frequent words and phrases are easily retrieved from memory and also tend to be shortened when we use them.
My earlier books concern the sound systems of language, the structure of words, and the way grammatical categories such as tense and mood are created over time through language use. My latest book deals with how words are put together to form constructions and how these constructions change over time because of processes that occur in communication.
I taught Linguistics for sixteen years at the University at Buffalo (in New York state), and twenty-one years at the University of New Mexico. I am now retired, but still writing books on linguistics. In addition, I have a ranch in central New Mexico that I operate on sustainable principles, producing grassfed beef.
(Photo courtesy of Dr. Renqiang Wang, Professor at Sichuan International Studies University, China)
