Empirical evidence for an inflationist lexicon

Abstract

Although generative and construction grammars both assume that some linguistic forms are stored/retrieved as wholes while others are strung together from simpler part, they differ with respect to the units that may be stored in the lexicon, and therefore in the rules that combine them. Within the generative framework, the determining factor for storage is regularity. In contrast, for construction grammarians frequency of use is an important factor determining whether a form is stored as a whole or (de)composed on-line. We present empirical evidence from self-paced reading, sentence recall, and chunk production experiments showing that speakers are sensitive to the frequency of use of regular, non-idiomatic multi-word sequences (at the end of ), thus suggesting that they are stored/retrieved as wholes (favoring the constructionist view). However, these frequency effects could rather reflect speeded/practiced rule-based (de)composition. Results from our chunk recall experiment with event-related potential recordings suggest that (some aspects) of such multi-word sequences may be holistically stored/retrieved.