[1] Influential proponents of usage-based linguistics include Michael Tomasello, Joan Bybee and Morten Christiansen.
It studies the lifespan of linguistic units (e.g. words, suffixes), arguing that they can survive language change through frequent usage or by participating in usage-based generalizations if their syntactic, semantic or pragmatic features overlap with other similar constructions.
For usage-based models of language, these discoveries legitimized interest in the peripheral phenomena and inspired the examination of the ontological status of the rules themselves.
[6] Secondly, WCCF focuses on the effects of social/ textual context and cognitive processes on human thought, instead of established systems and representations, which motivated the study of external sources in usage-based language research.
[7][8][9] This notion of syntax and morphology being an outcome of pragmatic and cognitive factors[10] was influential in the development of usage-based models.
[12] Consequently, a usage-based model accounts for these rule-governed language behaviours by providing a representational scheme that is entirely instance-based, and able to recognize and uniquely represent each familiar pattern, which occurs with varying strengths at different instances.
His usage-based model draws on the cognitive psychology of schemata,[13] which are flexible hierarchical structures that are able to accommodate the complexity of mental stimuli.
Langacker's work emphasizes that both abstract structure and instance-based detail are contained in language, differing in granularity but not in basic principles.
[18] Hans-Jörg Schmid’s "Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization" Model offers a comprehensive recent summary approach to usage-based thinking.
Advocates of usage-based linguistics including Joan Bybee and Martin Haspelmath argue that statistics of language usage depend on frequency.
It is hypothesized that such differences in the recurrence of the indirect object depend on statistical learning based on the language usage encountered by the individual.
In this model, general categories and grammar units can emerge from linguistic experiences stored in memories, as exemplars are categorized by similarity to each other.
The example of ‘drive someone crazy’ forms a chunk, however items that compose it are not analyzable individually as words that occur elsewhere in cognitive representation.