Much recent work argues that lexical frequency plays a central explanatory role in linguistic theory, but the status, predicted effects, and methodological treatment of frequency are controversial, especially so in the less-investigated area of syntactic variation. This article addresses these issues in a case study of lexical frequency effects on…

This article describes in detail several explicit computational methods for approaching such questions in phonology as the vowel/consonant distinction, the nature of vowel harmony systems, and syllable structure, appealing solely to distributional information. Beginning with the vowel/consonant distinction, we consider a method for its discovery…

The lexical semantic structures of change-of-state verbs are explored by linguistic theory, corpus analysis, and psycholinguistic experimentation. Data support the idea that these verbs can be divided into two classes, those for which change of state is internally caused and those for which it is externally caused. (Author/VWL)

An account of grammatical acquisition is developed within the parameter setting framework applied to a generalized categorical grammar (GCG). Computational simulation shows that several resulting acquisition procedures are effective on a parameter set expressing major typological distinctions based on constituent order, and defining 70 distinct…