Roughly speaking, log likelihood is seen as an improved type of significance test of chi-squared. They are inherently related in terms of data type and data distribution.
They are both accepted as good methods for significance test.
But chi-square test does not work well with frequency less than 5, LL does. Moreover, chi-square score changes drastically with very big corpus size.
Actually, frequency less than 5 will not good data anyway. That's to say, the 3-4 occurrences might be due to chance. In this case, some statisticians propose fisher exact test to deal with data less than five. I personally don't buy it.