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Description:
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Productivity of argument structure constructions is a new emerging field
within cognitive-functional linguistics. The term productivity as
used in linguistic research contains at least three subconcepts:
‘extensibility’, ‘regularity’, and ‘generality’. The focus in this study of
case and argument structure constructions in Icelandic is on the concept of
extensibility, while generality and regularity are regarded as derivative
of extensibility. Productivity is considered to be a function of type
frequency, semantic coherence, and the inverse correlation between these
two. This study establishes productivity as an emergent feature of the
grammatical system, in an analysis that is grounded in a usage-based
constructional approach, where constructions are organized into
lexicality-schematicity hierarchies. The view of syntactic productivity
advocated here offers a unified account of productivity, in that it
captures different degrees of productivity, ranging from highly productive
patterns through various intermediate degrees of productivity to low-level
analogical extensions.
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