From constructional innovation to linguistic change

On the basis of Present-day English corpus data, this paper investigates deliberate, adaptive linguistic innovations from a constructional perspective. The concrete phenomena addressed include the XYZ construction (“Copenhagen is the Paris of Denmark”), the X be not the Y-est Z in the Q construction (“He’s not the sharpest tool in the shed”), extrasentential not (“This is nice. Not.”), X much (“racist much?”), and the because X construction (“because science”). The paper first identifies speaker extravagance and sociocognitive salience as major factors in these innovations (Haspelmath 1999; Keller 1994; Schmid & Günther 2016). A second question is how these deliberate and noticeable (salient, extravagant) innovations spread and may become routinized and conventionalized, or may even turn into abstract productive patterns. From a constructional perspective, structures may be copied verbatim, leading to an increase in token frequency. A simple increase in token frequency may already result in conventionalization and loss of salience (bleaching). But constructions may not only be copied verbatim. Language users may detect some abstract patterning, which, in turn, can then be used productively. The result would not necessarily be an increase in token, but in type frequency, resulting in snowcloning and general productivity. Arguably, this may lead to a slower loss of salience, e.g., while the abstract pattern and some individual instances become generally less salient, some new, innovative tokens may still be considered extravagant and may keep the pattern productive and noticeable. At the same time, constructions may undergo shifts in their particular constraints (e.g., for slot fillers).