Negative evidence and the raw frequency fallacy* - CiteSeerX

74 A. Stefanowitsch
Third, while it is plausible to speak of different degrees of attraction
or repulsion in the case of combinations that do occur, it is less clear
whether it makes sense to speak of different degrees of absence, as the
ranking of significantly absent collexemes in Table 5 suggests. Methodologically,
this ranking merely reflects the certainty with which we can
say that a structure is impossible. One may (but need not) argue, though,
that this certainty reflects the certainty of a native speaker, in which case
the ‘degrees of absence’ do become relevant to theoretical considerations.
Whether the predictions of such a view are borne out by empirical data
remains to be seen.
More generally, it seems to me that accepting the methodology I have
argued for here may lead to a slight but pervasive reorientation of linguistic
theory. If we accept significant presence and significant absence
(as well as significant frequency and rareness) as the primary facts that
a linguistic theory must explain, then this theory will have to be broader
than most current theories. Rather than focusing exclusively on grammaticality,
such a theory would have to uncover the whole range of
causes for the presence and absence of linguistic structures and investigate
all of them with the same degree of rigor and explicitness. The aim
of linguistic analysis would no longer be “to separate the grammatical
sequences which are the sentences of [a language] L from the ungrammatical
sequences which are not sentences of L and to study the structure
of the grammatical sentences” (Chomsky 1957: 13). Instead, the
aim would be to provide for individual languages and, ultimately, for
language in general a comprehensive theory of the occurring and the
non-occurring. 8
Received January 2006
Revisions received March 2006
Final acceptance March 2006
University of Bremen
Notes
* I would like to thank Stefan Gries, Arne Zeschel and the participants of the 7.
Norddeutsches Linguistisches Kolloquium for their comments on the ideas presented
in this paper. Any conceptual errors are mine alone.
1. Actually, there are several potential reasons for the oddness of McEnery and Wilson’s
example (for example, the use of the simple present and the potential violation
of the selection restrictions of the verb shine by the direct object NP books).
Their discussion suggests, however, that they are concerned with complementation.
2. An overview over this method and its place in the corpus-based study of grammatical
patterns will be provided in Stefanowitsch and Gries (to appear b); meanwhile,
an introduction can be found on my website at . This website also provides a number of Perl scripts for doing col-