A rejoinder to Maarten Lemmens’s paper ‘In defence of frequency generalisations and usage-based linguistics. An answer to Frederick Newmeyer’s “Conversational corpora : when big is beautiful”’

Abstract

1. Some introductory remarks First, I must express my heart-felt gratitude to Maarten Lemmens for writing a collegial, thought-provoking, and informative reply to my position paper. I learned a great deal from it and can honestly say that if I pursue the issues that I brought up in my piece I will have much recourse to Lemmens’s reply. That said, I found this an extremely difficult rejoinder to write. The reason for my difficulty derives from the great disconnect between the content and claim...