Who ’ s Afraid of George Kingsley Zipf ?

We explore the implications of Zipf’s law for the understanding of linguistic productivity. Focusing on language acquisition, we show that the item/usage based approach has not been supported by adequate statistical evidence. By contrast, the quantitative properties of a productive grammar can be precisely formulated, and are consistent with even very young children’s language. Moreover, drawing from research in computational linguistics, the statistical properties of natural language strongly suggest that the theory of grammar be composed of general principles with overarching range of applications rather than a collection of item and construction specific expressions.