Introduction

Central to the usage-based position is the hypothesis that instances of use impact the cognitive representation of language. Throughout this book arguments for an exemplar representation of language will be given, including the arguments that exemplar representations keep track of usage, allow for the representation of gradience in structures, and allow for gradual change. In demonstrating the properties of exemplar models, the present chapter will emphasize one aspect of exemplar representation – the fact that exemplars are considered to register details about linguistic experience. Exemplar representations are rich memory representations; they contain, at least potentially, all the information a language user can perceive in a linguistic experience. This information consists of phonetic detail, including redundant and variable features, the lexical items and constructions used, the meaning, inferences made from this meaning and from the context, and properties of the social, physical and linguistic context.

We see in this chapter that recent research in phonetic categorization, voice recognition, sociophonetics, lexical diffusion of sound change, grammaticalization, and verbatim recall all point to the retention of considerable linguistic detail in cognitive representations. The interesting questions to be addressed here and in the rest of this book are how the brain deals with this detail, how it handles similarities and differences among tokens of input and registered exemplars and how repetition of tokens affects representations.