Language Form - Language Use - A Hypothesis on the Frequency Correspondences and Predictability

A long time ago, my professor, whose name I intentionally withhold, told me one law of the universe -that is, the frequency is the law.

It works well when applied to most phenomena, including language use.

Grammar is no exception. For the sake of convenience, we humans prefer shorter versions to longer ones such as a boy and three boys.

Haspelmath (2021) offers a hypothesis - that is that language use affects the form of grammar.

The form-frequency correspondence - is posted to be universal, that is, the shorter form reflects more use among people. The author cites examples of the use of present tense over past tenses and the use of singular form over plural forms.

The laws that I intend to investigate further are:

1. "The Form-Frequency Correspondence Universal Law" - that is that "Languages tend to have shorter forms for more frequent meanings."

This hypothesis has been formulated from his observation that singular nouns are more frequent than plural nouns, and present-tense forms are more frequent than future-tense forms.

The idea of form–frequency correspondences in grammar

"Language systems favour efficient coding (Hawkins Reference Hawkins2004, Reference Hawkins2014), or that they support efficient communication (Gibson et al. Reference Gibson, Futrell, Piandadosi, Dautriche, Mahowald, Bergen and Levy2019)."

 Source: 

HASPELMATH, M. (2021). Explaining grammatical coding asymmetries: Form–frequency correspondences and predictability. Journal of Linguistics, 57(3), 605-633. doi:10.1017/S0022226720000535