In every-day language use, two or more structurally unrelated constructions may occasionally give rise to strings
that look very similar on the surface. As a result of this superficial resemblance, a subset of instances of one of these
constructions may deviate in the probabilistic preference for either of several possible formal variants. This effect is called
‘constructional contamination’, and was introduced in Pijpops & Van de Velde
(2016). Constructional contamination bears testimony to the hypothesis that language users do not always execute a full
parse of the utterances they interpret, but instead often rely on ‘shallow parsing’ and the storage of large, unanalyzed chunks of
language in memory, as proposed in Ferreira, Bailey, & Ferraro (2002), Ferreira & Patson (2007), and Dąbrowska
(2014).
Pijpops & Van de Velde (2016) investigated a single case study in
depth, namely the Dutch partitive genitive. This case study is reviewed, and three new case studies are added, namely the
competition between long and bare infinitives, word order variation in verbal clusters, and preterite formation. We find evidence
of constructional contamination in all case studies, albeit in varying degrees. This indicates that constructional contamination
is not a particularity of the Dutch partitive genitive but appears to be more wide-spread, affecting both morphology and syntax.
Furthermore, we distinguish between two forms of constructional contamination, viz. first degree and second degree contamination,
with first degree contamination producing greater effects than second degree contamination.
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2024. Corpus linguistics meets historical linguistics and construction grammar: how far have we come, and where do we go from here?. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 20:3 ► pp. 481 ff.
Norde, Muriel & Graeme Trousdale
2024. Creativity, paradigms and morphological constructions: evidence from Dutch pseudoparticiples. Linguistics
Sevenants, Anthe, Freek Van de Velde & Dirk Speelman
2024. Investigating lexical-semantic effects on morphosyntactic variation using elastic net regression. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory
2023. The Long‐Term Accrual in Memory of Contextual Conditioning Effects. In The Handbook of Usage‐Based Linguistics, ► pp. 179 ff.
Diessel, Holger
2023. The Constructicon,
Zhang, Yuhan, Rachel Ryskin & Edward Gibson
2023. A noisy-channel approach to depth-charge illusions. Cognition 232 ► pp. 105346 ff.
Bouso, Tamara
2022. Where Does Lexical Diversity Come From? Horizontal Interaction in the Network of the Late Modern English Reaction Object Construction. English Studies 103:8 ► pp. 1334 ff.
2020. A corpus-based quantitative analysis of twelve centuries of preterite and past participle morphology in Dutch. Language Variation and Change 32:2 ► pp. 241 ff.
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