Usage-based Approach Research Articles

Usage in Second Language Acquisition: Critical Reflections and Future Directions (Book Review)

In Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research, the term usage refers generally to a learner’s exposure to language, their production of it, and how they apply it in social interactions and deliberate practice. Though important in SLA research, usage does not have a standardized definition, with usage-based approaches defining it in various ways, and many focusing on a single aspect of language use. As a result, conducting comparisons across studies is challenging, and usage-based pedagogical practices could be misinformed. With a misrepresented concept of usage, second language (L2) educators employing usage-based teaching in the classroom may fail to prepare students for actual situations of L2 use. Usage in Second Language Acquisition: Critical Reflections and Future Directions (2024) aims to address this challenge by bringing together existing definitions and theorizations to provide a transparent description of usage and how it relates to L2 development. The editor’s goal is to understand the extent of agreement and disagreement of key theoretical constructs among approaches, to clarify how they are represented differently in literature, and to provide recommendations for future research in linguistics and pedagogy. [First Paragraph of Review]

Semiotic packaging of teacher talk for affective recyclings: A usage-based approach to children's construction development

This study examines how iconically designed teacher talk facilitates preschool novice L2 learners' construction development through playful interactions. It combines two approaches: ethnomethodological conversation analysis and usage-based linguistics. The conversational data were retrieved from teacher-children interactions filmed at an all-English school in Japan. The microanalysis of 945-min classroom interactions illustrated that when a part of teacher talk was packaged with iconic semiotic resources, such as gestures, situated meanings, tones of voice, and affective stances, it became accessible L2 resources for the children to learn and recycle in their subsequent utterances. Simultaneously, the analysis also revealed the pragmatic mechanism of teachers' assignment of interactional responsibility, inviting children to perform language learning of target constructions through recyclings. The recycled part of the teacher talk indicated the children's microgenetic usage-based language learning as they modified and developed L2 constructions to accomplish certain social actions—sanction of a deviated action, attention-getting, and storytelling in situ. This study indicates that language learning opportunities can be integrated into children's processes of achieving specific social actions, and language learning performance can be invited as an appropriate practice in situ by certain teacher talk designs.

Sociolinguistic Style, Awareness, and Agency among Southern California Latinx Spanish–English Bilinguals

This study examined different degrees of awareness regarding the stigmatization of Southern California (SoCal) Spanish across four groups of Spanish–English bilinguals from Southern California (n = 87). The participants were presented with Spanish sentences and asked to decide which profile of speaker would likely express that sentence, given six options, such as: “someone living in Los Angeles/SoCal who grew up in Mexico” or “a Spanish-English bilingual who grew up in Los Angeles/SoCal”. Experimental stimuli included seven different linguistic categories of stigmatization, including English contact forms. The participants tended to attribute the stigmatized forms to bilinguals who grew up in Southern California. Central Colloquial and Taboo categories were more salient and perceived as forms used by people in Mexico. In contrast, English borrowings and redundancies seemed to be recognized by the participants, particularly for simultaneous bilinguals who grew up in Southern California, as salient forms of an identified Southern California Spanish variety. The results are interpreted within Exemplar Theory, with certain stigmatized forms indexing “Mexican Spanish” exemplars, and English borrowings identified as exemplars of SoCal Spanish. We advocate for usage-based approaches to understanding language perceptions and critical approaches to interrogating academic discourses.

Usage-based approaches to assessing syntactic sophistication in second language writing: Interaction of genre and proficiency

Based on usage-based approaches to language learning, this study investigated how second language (L2) writers use verbs and argument structure constructions across different genres, while also exploring how this genre effect interacts with L2 writing proficiency. We analyzed five previously established usage-based indices using a learner corpus comprising argumentative and narrative essays elicited from 3196 college-level learners. Through a series of mixed-effects regression analyses, we identified a consistent genre effect, with argumentative essays featuring a more sophisticated use of verbs and constructions alongside a greater diversity in construction types. Additionally, a significant interaction emerged between genre and proficiency regarding construction frequency and the frequency of verb–construction combinations. These results indicate that while the previously observed genre effect extends to the L2 use of verbs and constructions, its manifestation varies depending on L2 proficiency. Overall, our study supports the usage-based learning of verbs and constructions in the context of L2 writing.

Speech pauses in speakers with and without aphasia: A usage-based approach

Pauses in speech are indicators of cognitive effort during language production and have been examined to inform theories of lexical, grammatical and discourse processing in healthy speakers and individuals with aphasia (IWA). Studies of pauses have commonly focused on their location and duration in relation to grammatical properties such as word class or phrase complexity. However, recent studies of speech output in aphasia have revealed that utterances of IWA are characterised by stronger collocations, i.e., combinations of words that are often used together. We investigated the effects of collocation strength and lexical frequency on pause duration in comic strip narrations of IWA and non-brain-damaged (NBD) individuals with part of speech (PoS; content and function words) as covariate. Both groups showed a decrease in pause duration within more strongly collocated bigrams and before more frequent content words, with stronger effects in IWA. These results are consistent with frameworks which propose that strong collocations are more likely to be processed as holistic, perhaps even word-like, units. Usage-based approaches prove valuable in explaining patterns of preservation and impairment in aphasic language production.

Words can only get us so far

The traditional ontological division between the lexicon and grammar has often resulted in a reductionist view of the lexicon and lexical competence as composed of individual words in isolation. This narrow view of the lexicon has transcended disciplinary boundaries and is apparent in the focus on single words of widely used psycholinguistic measures of language (e.g. picture naming, verbal fluency, lexical decision) and cognitive ability alike (e.g. Stroop, recall in working memory span). This article argues that such an approach has imposed limitations on the questions that can be examined by researchers and on the generalizability of some results. Here I propose that, rather than assigning multiword units their own ‘niche’ in psycholinguistic studies, they should be viewed as part of the way core lexical competence is measured and conceptualized, both in monolingual and bilingual speakers. I also review promising advances in recent years brought about by a surge in the number of studies focused on multiword units and by new tasks of individual cognitive skill (e.g. multiword-based chunking ability). These hold the potential to allow for a cross-disciplinary shift in the examination of lexical competence as grounded in community-based norms and in line with current usage-based approaches.

A new soft clustering method for traffic prediction in bike-sharing systems

For the efficient management of bike-sharing systems (BSSs), accurate demand predictions are crucial to address the uneven distribution of bikes at various stations. Recent studies have explored a hierarchical prediction framework using cluster-level models to more accurately estimate demand at the station level. However, in frameworks based on hard clustering, where each station is exclusively assigned to one of several clusters, prediction accuracy tends to be lower for stations at the cluster boundaries. To improve accuracy for such stations, this study proposes a novel soft clustering algorithm for BSSs. The key idea is to allow stations to belong to multiple clusters, calculating the membership degree for each station based on transitions between stations and clusters obtained through hard clustering. This study also investigated the impact of restricting clusters to which individual stations belong based on distance or usage history. Two approaches, distance- and usage-based, were employed to determine the clusters to which each station belongs. Experimental results using Seoul Bike data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in enhancing traffic prediction accuracy within the hierarchical prediction framework. Notably, excluding clusters with minimal usage for each station using the usage-based approach yielded the best performance.

Revisiting the aspectual BUSY in (South African) English

Abstract This paper investigates the so-called South African English busy progressive (for example, I’m busy working). Linguistic literature on South African English (SAfE) often states that this construction is a typical feature of this variety of English. The use and the frequency of this construction is mostly attributed to the influence of the Afrikaans [BUSYPROG XCOMP VINF] construction, as in Ek is besig om te werk (‘I am working’). The aim of this paper is twofold: Firstly, it critically evaluates some of the claims that have been made about the so-called “SAfE busy progressive” and, secondly, it uses a corpus- and usage-based approach that employs a greater assortment of available corpus data from SAfE and other English varieties, as well as available information on the Afrikaans and Dutch progressives, to explore the possibility of new insights into the use of busy in English aspectual constructions.

The ditransitive construction and the double accusative construction as allostructions: Corpus-based analysis and pedagogical applications

The study explores the challenges encountered by Italian-speaking students with the learning of the German ditransitive construction. While prior research has extensively covered theoretical aspects of this construction, limited attention has been paid to its practical implications for foreign language learning.The study further elaborates on a related construction involving a similar semantics but realized with two accusative objects. Verbs which can fuse with this construction are e.g. lehren (‘to teach’), abfragen (‘to interrogate/to test’) or abhören (‘to test orally’). This related construction is often overlooked in language learning materials. The paper addresses this gap by combining empirical evidence from two pretests with Italian learners and a usage-based approach with corpus data, focusing on the verb lehren.The findings contribute to a better understanding and a more authentic description of the ditransitive construction. In a more theoretical perspective, the paper further discusses the relationship between the ditransitive and the double accusative construction in terms of ‘allostructions’, again with a focus on instantiations with the verb lehren. The insights gained with the study can help foster the learning of both constructions.

Unveiling the Impact of Language Input and Regular Exposure to Language in Turkish (Second Language) and English (Foreign Language) Education Through a Dynamic Usage-Based Approach

The focus of the study is on the commonly problematic speaking skills of second/foreign language learners during interaction and communication. The participants are able to communicate effectively to some extent; however, they struggle with speaking fluency and accuracy. Consequently, the potential purpose is to investigate the efficacy of the Dynamic Usage-Based Approach (DUB) in developing second/foreign language learners' speaking skills. Under investigation were 120 second/foreign language learners between the ages of 18 and 22. Using a quantitative quasi-experimental study design, the study was conducted in four intact B1 level second language (Turkish) and foreign language (English) classes. The research lasted four weeks and included a total of 12 classes. The DUB was used in the study, as well as the "Movie method," which involves systematic observation and analysis of films to increase language exposure and foster practical language use in real-world circumstances. The study included a a pre-test, treatment, post-test, and questionnaire. The participants were divided into experimental and control groups through random assignment. The Independent Sample T-Test was used to examine the results, as well as a descriptive analysis of the questionnaire data. The results indicate that the DUB has proven its efficacy in experimental groups and could potentially be used to help students enhance their speaking skills. It was observed that the control groups, who received the usual instructions from their instructors, attained comparable post-test scores. While the development of the experimental classes differed significantly, the results indicate that DUB is more beneficial for acquiring overall oral skills. The questionnaire also included a measure of confidence. Students in the experimental classes were more likely to use L2 than those in control groups, according to the data.

Print exposure leads to individual differences in the Turkish aorist

Several studies have established that not all native speakers extract the same generalization for a given construction due to speaker internal or external reasons, challenging a widely held assumption in linguistics. While there is a considerable number of studies investigating individual differences in grammatical knowledge in other languages, very little is known about how L1 Turkish speakers might manifest such differences in their linguistic knowledge. This is the first study to examine individual differences in the constructional representation of the Turkish aorist in adult L1 Turkish speakers. The aorist is known to be irregular and pose acquisition problems, especially when combined with monosyllabic sonorant ending verbs. The variants of the Turkish aorist have different corpus frequencies across spoken and written modalities. The study investigates to what extent differences in print exposure would lead to differences in how L1 Turkish speakers would apply the construction to monosyllabic-sonorant ending nonce-verbs. Based on the results, people with more written language experience extracted a more sensitive rule that applies to monosyllabic-sonorant ending nonce-verbs, such that they produced more -Ir than -Ar. Contrastingly, people who read less used more -Ar (r = –0.35), and print exposure accounted for roughly 12% of the variance. Our findings are compatible with usage-based approaches and suggest that print exposure-borne differences are pervasive in linguistic knowledge, adding to the growing body of evidence that challenges the convergence hypothesis.

Does the Processing Advantage of Formulaic Language Persist in Its Nonadjacent Forms? Evidence from Eye Movements of Chinese Collocations.

It has been well documented that formulaic language (such as collocations; e.g., provide information) enjoys a processing advantage over novel language (e.g., compare information). In natural language use, however, many formulaic sequences are often inserted with words intervening in between the individual constituents (e.g., provided information → provide some of the information). Whether or not the processing advantage persists in nonadjacent forms remains largely unknown. The present study thus sought to address this gap by recording the eye movements of Chinese native speakers when they were reading sentences embedded with formulaic sequences (high frequency collocations) versus novel phrases (low frequency controls), in their adjacent (e.g., 'resolve difficulties' vs. 'experience difficulties'), short-insertion (e.g., 'resolve these difficulties' vs. 'experience these difficulties'), and long-insertion forms (e.g., 'resolved so many difficulties' vs. 'experienced so many difficulties'). Results suggested that the processing advantage for formulaic language over novel language existed not only in their adjacent form, but also in their short-insertion form, albeit the magnitude of the processing advantage diminished with the increase of insertion length. The persistence of FL processing advantage is in line with usage-based approach to language learning, processing, and use.

Statistics versus semantics: retreating from the dative overgeneralization errors by Chinese EFL learners

AbstractThis study investigated the effects of entrenchment, preemption, verb semantics, and morphophonological constraints in Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners’ retreat from the overgeneralization errors of English dative alternations. Two groups of Chinese EFL learners rated the acceptability of 66 dative verbs in their well and ill forms. The results demonstrated that Chinese EFL learners were simultaneously sensitive to the multiple cues from entrenchment, preemption, semantic, and morphophonological constraints, indicating that Chinese EFL learners restricted the generalization of the dative alternation by utilizing both the statistical verb-bias information and semantic properties of the dative verbs. Moreover, the sensitivity of Chinese EFL learners to these constraints increases with the improvement of their English proficiency. These results validated the usage-based approaches to second language acquisition and provided an answer to the “Baker’s Paradox.”

On the nature and organisation of morphological categories: verbal aspect through the lens of associative learning

The process by which awareness and/or knowledge of linguistic categories arises from exposure to patterns in data alone, known as emergence, is the corner stone of usage-based approaches to language. The present paper zooms in on the types of patterns that language users may detect in the input to determine the content, and hence the nature, of the hypothesised morphological category of aspect.The large-scale corpus and computational studies we present focus on the morphological encoding of temporal information as exemplified by aspect (imperfective/perfective) in Polish. Aspect is so heavily grammaticalized that it is marked on every verb form, yielding the practice of positing infinitival verb pairs (‘do’ = ‘robićimpf/zrobićpf’) to represent a complete aspectual paradigm. As has been shown for nominal declension, however, aspectual usage appears uneven, with 90% of verbs strongly preferring one aspect over the other. This makes the theoretical aspectual paradigm in practice very gappy, triggering an acute sense of partialness in usage. Operationalising emergence as learnability, we simulate learning to use aspect from exposure with a computational implementation of the Rescorla-Wager rule of associative learning. We find that paradigmatic gappiness in usage does not diminish learnability; to the contrary, a very high prediction accuracy is achieved using as cues only the verb and its tense; contextual information does not further improve performance. Aspect emerges as a strongly lexical phenomenon. Hence, the question of cognitive reality of aspectual categories, as an example of morphological categories in general, should be reformulated to ask which continuous cues must be learned to enable categorisation of aspectual outcomes. We discuss how the gappiness of the paradigm plays a crucial role in this process, and how an iteratively learned, continuously developing association presents a possible mechanism by which language users process their experience of cue-outcome co-occurrences and learn to use morphological forms, without the need for abstractions.

A Polish adaptation of the usage-based approach to metaphor identification and analysis in caregiver interactions with children

As metaphors are difficult to elicit through experimental tools, especially at a young age, it has been proposed that corpora of naturalistic interactions between children and their primary caregivers present an alternative avenue for accessing the language of very young speakers (Gaskins et al., 2023). However, this approach has been developed with English data in mind, adding to the predominantly Anglocentric nature of child language research. The current article demonstrates how the approach can be adapted for use with children acquiring Polish and, by extension, other inflected Slavic languages, where metaphors are often encoded word-internally. The article justifies the motivations which have shaped the development of this adaptation and demonstrates what metaphors it has unearthed in the speech of a Polish-speaking two- to five-year-old child, and her primary caregivers. It is argued that the approach could carry a significant potential in future research if applied to densely sampled data from monolingual acquisition in Polish settings.

Regularization and Innovation: A Usage-Based Approach to Past Participle Variation in Brazilian Portuguese

This project explores the synchronic variation of participle forms in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). Despite general systematicity, the language maintains many historically irregular participles, which often compete with regularized variants. The language has also developed innovative participles, which tend to exist in variation with regular forms. Adopting a usage-based framework, the study examines how analogical processes affect persistent irregular participles and short-form forms in BP, emphasizing the role of grammatical context and frequency. Data are drawn from the Portuguese Web 2011 corpus, including 12 verbs with long-form Latinate irregulars (n = 4800) and 8 verbs with short-form forms (n = 3200). The results show that long-form Latinate irregulars are more common as adjectives and with the verb estar, while regularized forms are prevalent with ser and in perfect constructions. Conversely, short-form participles occur least frequently in perfect constructions, showing a tendency towards the maintenance of regularity in this context. Additionally, verbs that occur more often in perfect constructions are most resistant to innovation. These findings indicate that perfect constructions play a dual role in promoting and preserving regularity in BP and shed light on how grammar–internal relationships and contexts of occurrence play a role in language variation and change.

Agentive Cognitive Construction Grammar: a predictive semiotic theory of mind and language

Abstract This paper introduces a novel perspective on Agentive Cognitive Construction Grammar (AgCCxG) by examining the intricate interplay between mind and language through the lens of both Active Inference and Peircean semiotics. AgCCxG emphasizes the impact of intention and purpose on linguistic choices as a cognitive imperative to balance the symbolic Self (Intelligent Agent) with the dynamics of the environment. Among other things, the paper posits that linguistic constructions, particularly Constructional Attachment Patterns (CAPs), like argument structure constructions, embody experienced interactions with the world through reenactment routines via the integration of multisensory channels. Unlike traditional usage-based approaches (e.g., construction grammars), AgCCxG embraces a robust theory of signs that reveals human representation as a continuous process of semiotic hybridization for the creative prediction of uncertain scenarios. Importantly, the paper challenges the notion of the mind as a unified, rational, uncertainty-reducing machine by asserting that physical processes governing open biological systems profoundly influence the linguistic sign system. Intelligent agents’ adaptability in expressing incongruous realities thus highlights the role of semiotic hybridization in preserving an agent’s autonomy and semiotic boundary.

Conceptualizing Corpus-Based Genre Pedagogy as Usage-Inspired Second Language Instruction

Abstract Corpus-based genre pedagogy (CBGP), the instructional integration of discourse-based rhetorical analysis and corpus-based linguistic analysis of diverse genres, has gained attention from English for Academic Purposes (EAP) researchers and practitioners aiming to cultivate the academic writing skills of second language (L2) learners. This has led to a need for the continuous conceptualization of CBGP (Lu, Xiaofei, J. Casal Elliott, and Yingying Liu. 2021. “Towards the Synergy of Genre- and Corpus-Based Approaches to Academic Writing Research and Pedagogy.” International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching 11 (1): 59–71). Additionally, usage-based approaches to L2 acquisition (U-SLA), a collection of cognitive and potentially sociocognitive theoretical approaches to language and language acquisition (Ellis, Nick C., Ute Römer, and Matthew Brook O’Donnell. 2016. Usage-Based Approaches to Language Acquisition and Processing: Cognitive and Corpus Investigations. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell; Wulff, Stepanie, and Nick C. Ellis. 2018. “Usage-Based Approaches to Second Language Acquisition.” In Bilingual Cognition and Language: The State of the Science across its Subfields, edited by D. Miller, F. Bayram, J. Rothman, and L. Serratrice, 37–56. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company), have called for more pedagogically oriented research informed by usage-based principles (e.g., Tyler, Andrea E., Hae In Park, Mariko Uno, and Lourdes Ortega, eds. 2018. Usage-inspired L2 Instruction: Researched Pedagogy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company). Responding to such calls, we argue for conceptualizing CBGP as usage-inspired instruction given its intersections with key U-SLA instructional tenets. We first systematically review empirical studies on CBGP. Then, we introduce relevant U-SLA instructional tenets and interpret the CBGP studies to illuminate the extent to which CBGP resonates with different aspects of the U-SLA tenets. Eventually, we argue that CBGP can potentially unify the “social” and the “cognitive” in U-SLA’s accounts of L2 teaching and learning, making it a feasible way to materialize usage-inspired L2 instruction in actual classroom practice. Finally, we discuss future research and practical directions.

On the Connection Between Language Change and Language Processing.

Previous studies provided evidence for a connection between language processing and language change. We add to these studies with an exploration of the influence of lexical-distributional properties of words in orthographic space, semantic space, and the mapping between orthographic and semantic space on the probability of lexical extinction. Through a binomial linear regression analysis, we investigated the probability of lexical extinction by the first decade of the twenty-first century (2000s) for words that existed in the first decade of the nineteenth-century (1800s) in eight data sets for five languages: English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. The binomial linear regression analysis revealed that words that are more similar in form to other words are less likely to disappear from a language. By contrast, words that are more similar in meaning to other words are more likely to become extinct. In addition, a more consistent mapping between form and meaning protects a word from lexical extinction. A nonlinear time-to-event analysis furthermore revealed that the position of a word in orthographic and semantic space continues to influence the probability of it disappearing from a language for at least 200 years. Effects of the lexical-distributional properties of words under investigation here have been reported in the language processing literature as well. The results reported here, therefore, fit well with a usage-based approach to language change, which holds that language change is at least to some extent connected to cognitive mechanisms in the humanbrain.

Maahanmuuttotaustaisten kielenoppijoiden moninaiset kielet ja polut

While student diversity is increasing, it is crucial for teachers to be aware of how to recognize the importance and potential of the language background and existing skills that their students bring with them. This article presents some research findings and data excerpts on how these are reflected in the learners’ opportunities for participation in interaction and various activities in learning communities. The theoretical framework consists of ecological and usage-based approaches that have served as a basis for pedagogies that center multilingual repertoires, language awareness and social interaction at the core of language learning. The perspective adopted in the article is primarily that of individual learners who are learning Finnish as their second language. Some future prospects in the field of language education are also discussed with regard to the increasing student diversity and the need for ensuring equitable language learning opportunities for all.