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In:Lexical Variation and Knowledge Construction across Historical, Methodological, and Cultural Ecologies
Edited by Rossella Latorraca, Rita Calabrese, Jacqueline Aiello and Dirk Geeraerts
[Terminology and Lexicography Research and Practice 25] 2026
► pp. 179–196

Lexical frequency effects on language variation

 | University of Foggia
 | University of Essex
 | University of Salerno
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
Lexical frequency has long been accounted for as a strong predictor of sociolinguistic variation (Pierrehumbert 2002). Underlying frequency results in language variation are based on a certain predictability: common words behave differently from infrequent ones. Variationists have often measured frequency according to whole-word values. However, previously hidden frequency effects were found to surface if measured by Stem frequency. This paper tests different measures for a phonological variable which we believe has no morphological conditioning: word-final (t) glottaling in British English. The different measures we test include: Whole-word frequency (measured according to own corpus, BNC and the SUBTLEX-UK corpus), alongside Stem frequency, and Conditional frequency. We argue that Conditional frequency, alongside the traditional whole-word measure, best accounts for our purely-phonological data.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methods
    • Own corpus frequency
    • British National Corpus (BNC)
    • SUBTLEXUK corpus
    • Stem frequency
    • Conditional frequency
  • 3.Results
  • 4.Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
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