Les paradoxes de la fréquence

Abstract

This article is an enquiry (mostly doxographic) about the role of the frequency in linguistic description. Frequency is mostly seen as the object of quantitative methods, but it may also be intuitive and, sometimes, it is a purely abstract argument. Under these different forms it is an ubiquitous notion in linguistics, used by linguists of almost all theoretical persuations and in almost all fields of the discipline, but it is rarely regarded as a central concept of linguistics. Taking into account this diversity of the usages of the frequency, this article tries to investigate the paradoxical status of frequency, both ubiquitous and weakly elaborated. Two theoretical frameworks may be of particular interest for a general account of the frequency dimension of the linguistic phenomena: the Coserian framework (and its concept of norm), and the usage-based view of grammar developped in a cognitive perspective. These two frameworks gound frequency respectively in the historicity of the language use and in the universality of the cognitive processing.

Keywords

• frequency, repetition, quantitative methods, norm, corpus