The Mental Corpus

Abstract

This book argues that knowledge of a language can be thought of as a mental corpus, that is, as a repository of memories of previous linguistic encounters with the language. Features of incoming language resonate with items already stored. Similarities between stored items give rise to generalizations of varying degrees of certainty and precision, which in turn are able to sanction new and innovative expressions. The thesis is argued on the basis of both psycholinguistic and language-internal evidence. The former shows that speakers have implicit knowledge of distributional and statistical properties of encountered language, while language data testifies to speakers’ precise knowledge of idiosyncratic facts of usage.

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