Negative entrenchment: A usage-based approach to negative evidence

The alleged absence of negative evidence in the linguistic input has played a major role both in linguistic theorizing and in discussions about linguistic methodology. I argue that, given a sufficiently sophisticated understanding of frequency, negative evidence can be inferred from the positive evidence in the linguistic input. Using an extension of collostructional analysis, I show how the corpus linguist, and, by analogy, the language learner, can discriminate between combinations of linguistic items that are accidentally absent from a given corpus and combinations whose absence is statistically significant. I also show that this kind of negative corpus evidence correlates with degrees of acceptability in judgment tasks. I propose a conceptualization of such negative evidence as negative entrenchment in a usage-based model.