This volume collects three decades of articles by the distinguished linguist Joan Bybee. Her articles essentially argue for the importance off frequency of use as a factor in the analysis and explanation of language structure. Her work has been very influential for a broad range of researchers in linguistics, particularly in discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, phonology, phonetics, and historical linguistics.

Language demonstrates structure while also showing considerable variation at all levels: languages differ from one another while still being shaped by the same principles; utterances within a language differ from one another while exhibiting the same structural patterns; languages change over time, but in fairly regular ways. This book focuses on the dynamic processes that create languages and give them their structure and variance. It outlines a theory of language that addresses the nature of grammar, taking into account its variance and gradience, and seeks explanation in terms of the...