GRAMMAR IS GRAMMAR AND USAGE IS USAGE
Frederick J. Newmeyer
Department of Linguistics
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195-4340
fjn@u.washington.edu
January 2003

21. Usage-based models of grammar
The late 1960s was an exciting time to enter field of linguistics for someone like
me, whose interests tended to syntax and semantics.
1
My firs ye r as a graduate
student witnessed the birth of the approach called ‘generative semantics’.
Generative semantics promised to totally revolutionize the field of
transformational generative grammar, which itself was barely a decade old at the
time. With each passing year, generative semanticists declared that some
seemingly well-established boundary was nothing but an illusion. It all began in
1967 when George Lakoff and Haj Ross challenged the existence of the level of
Deep Structure, and with it the boundary between syntax and semantics (Lakoff
and Ross 1967/1976). The following year Jim McCawley argued that syntactic
and lexical structures were formal objects of the same sort (McCawley 1968).
Then in quick succession, the dividing line between semantics and pragmatics
(Lakoff 1970/1972), grammaticality and ungrammaticality (Lakoff 1973),
category membership and non-membership (Ross 1973a; b), and, finally,
grammar and usage (Lakoff 1974) were all cast into doubt. At the same time,
many sociolinguists were proposing models in which statistical facts about the
speech community were incorporated into grammatical rules (Labov 1969; 1972).
But by the late 1970s, generative semantics, for reasons I have discussed
elsewhere (Newmeyer 1986), had all but disappeared. Most syntacticians had re-
embraced the boundaries whose demise had been heralded only a few years
earlier.
The last decade has seen the resurgence of many of same ideas that were
the hallmark of generative semantics. In particular most of the ways of looking at
form and meaning that fall under the rubric of ‘cognitive linguistics’ have
reasserted — albeit in different form — the bulk of the ideas that characterized
generative semantics. Langacker 1987: 494 coined the term ‘usage-based model’
to refer to those approaches that reject a sharp distinction between language
knowledge and language use. My impression is that many more linguists around
the world do cognitive linguistics than do generative grammar. Many functional
linguists share the view of a usage-based model; indeed, the dividing line
between cognitive linguistics and functional linguistics has never been sharp.
The following quote from two prominent functionalists gives the flavor of what
is implicit in a ‘usage-based model’:
Increasingly, then, in many quarters structure has come to be seen not as a
holistic autonomous system but as something more fluid and shifting. An
influential concept here has been that of emergence (Hopper 1987; Hopper
1988; Hopper 1998), understood as an ongoing process of structurati
(Giddens 1984) … [E]mergent structures are unstable and manifested
stochastically … From this perspective, mental representations are seen as
provisional and temporary states of affairs that are sensitive, and
constantly adapting themselves, to usage. ‘Grammar’ itself and associated

1
This paper is a minimally revised version of my Linguistic Society of America Presidential
Address, delivered in Atlanta in January 2003.