Frequencies of occurrence play an important role in usage-based linguistics. This is because the information contained in (co-)occurrence frequencies can be used to explain how a grammar is constructed from the ground up with nothing but general cognitive capacities that detect regularities in sensory input. Usage-based linguists hypothesize that what we learn is a probabilistic grammar grounded in our language experience; this approach diverges markedly from the generativist position that limits the use of environmental triggers to set parameters specifying a fixed set of mutually exclusive linguistic properties. In such an experience-based grammar – which is the cognitive organization of someone’s experience with language – linguistic categories and linguistic structures are associated with activation or likelihood values that are determined by their relative frequencies in language use (see Elman et al. 1996 among other classics).