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Date: 20-Mar-2012 From: Julia Ulrich <julia.ulrichdegruyter.com> Subject: Incipient Productivity: Zeschel E-mail this message to a friend
Title: Incipient Productivity
Subtitle: A Construction-Based Approach to Linguistic Creativity
Series Title: Cognitive Linguistics Research [CLR] 49
Published: 2012
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
http://www.degruyter.com/mouton
Author: Arne Zeschel
Electronic: ISBN: 9783110274844 Pages: 268 Price: Europe EURO 99.95
Hardback: ISBN: 9783110270013 Pages: 268 Price: Europe EURO 99.95
Abstract:
How do speakers vary established patterns of language use and adapt them to novel contexts of application? This study presents a usage-based approach to linguistic creativity: combining detailed qualitative with large- scale quantitative analyses of corpus data, it traces the emergence of partial productivity in clusters of conventional collocations.
Focusing on English and German intensification constructions, it proceeds in three steps: having first inventoried the lexical means (of a given semantic type) that are recruited for signalling intensity in both languages, collostructional analysis is then used to identify entrenched intensity collocations involving these formatives in three different syntactic constructions. Third, multi-rater manual classification methods as well as distribution-based automatic classification methods are employed to uncover semantic generalisations over the attested types on different levels of abstraction.
Collocational expansion is shown to proceed through local analogies within sets of semantically similar stored instances of a construction. Synthesising insights from research on language acquisition, variation and change, it is thus argued that creative extensions of linguistic conventions are intrinsically bound up with aspects of memory and repetition.
Linguistic Field(s):
Cognitive Science
Semantics
Text/Corpus Linguistics
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