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Article published In:
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 29:2 (2024) ► pp.155–188

The inverse frequency effect

An exploratory study

ORCID logo | University of Rochester
Rare syntactic constructions show an especially strong tendency to be repeated, but some rare constructions exhibit this tendency much more strongly than others. The reasons for this variation are not well understood. This exploratory study examines five rare noun-phrase (NP) expansions in English: <the A> (the rich), <a Nprop Nprop> (a Bob Gates), <Nsing Nprop Nprop> (architect Julia Morgan), <D Npl Nsing> (the jobs data), and <Nsing A Nsing> (home electronic equipment). Repetition tendencies are very strong in the first and second of these and somewhat strong in the third; in the fourth and fifth they are much weaker, only slightly higher than those of common NP expansions such as <D A Nsing> (the black dog). To explain this variation, we suggest that constructions may be associated with different types of discourse: constructions with high repetition tendencies tend to occur in persuasive rather than informative discourse.
Keywords: priming, discourse, coordination, parallelism, inverse frequency effect
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous work on syntactic repetition
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Choice and definition of syntactic constructions
    • 3.2Measuring close repetition and parallelism
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Explaining the results
    • 5.2Limitations
  • 6.Conclusions and future directions
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 9 October 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.22080.tem
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