Kasutuspõhist

Kasutuspõhist is an Estonian term used to describe a branch of linguistics that studies how language change is shaped by actual usage over time. It emphasizes empirical data from spoken and written language and focuses on how patterns of use—such as word frequencies, collocations, and constructions—drive historical development.

The word combines elements meaning usage and historical grounding, and in practice it denotes a usage-based historical perspective rather than a strictly etymological reconstruction. The approach treats language as a system that evolves through everyday use, with changes propagating through communities and genres.

Methods commonly associated with kasutuspõhist include diachronic corpus linguistics, computational analysis of historical texts, and the comparison of large usage datasets across periods. Researchers look for shifts in frequency, meaning, and syntactic patterns, seeking to relate these changes to social, technological, or cultural factors that influence how people actually use language.

Applications of this approach include updating dictionaries and grammars to reflect real-world usage, informing language education and policy, and contributing to constructionist and cognitive theories of language change. It also supports the interpretation of historical texts by clarifying how contemporary readers might have perceived usage.

In related fields, kasutuspõhist intersects with historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, construction grammar, and cognitive linguistics, offering a data-driven perspective on the evolution of language over time.