Usage-based models of language

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The usage-based linguistics is a linguistics approach within a broader functional/cognitive framework, that emerged since the late 1980s, and that assumes a profound relation between linguistic structure and usage.^[1] It challenges the dominant focus, in 20th century linguistics (and in particular in formalism-generativism), on considering language as an isolated system removed from its use in human interaction and human cognition.^[1] Rather, usage-based models posit that linguistic information is expressed via context-sensitive mental processing and mental representations, which have the cognitive ability to succinctly account for the complexity of actual language use at all levels (phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax, pragmatics and semantics). Broadly speaking, a usage-based model of language accounts for language acquisition and processing, synchronic and diachronic patterns, and both low-level and high-level structure in language, by looking at actual language use.

The term usage-based was coined by Ronald Langacker in 1987.^[2] Usage-based models of language have become a significant new trend in linguistics since the early 2000s.^[1] Influential proponents of usage-based linguistics include Michael Tomasello, Joan Bybee and Morten Christiansen.

Together with related approaches, such as construction grammar, emergent grammar, and language as a complex adaptive system, usage-based linguistics belongs to the wider framework of evolutionary linguistics. 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.^[3] There is disagreement as to whether the approach is different from memetics or essentially the same.^[4]