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Part of
Language in Interaction: Studies in honor of Eve V. Clark
Edited by Inbal Arnon, Marisa Casillas, Chigusa Kurumada and Bruno Estigarribia
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 12] 2014
► pp. 303–314

Analytic and holistic processing 
in the development of constructions

| University of New Mexico

A corpus analysis over several decades of American English shows the development of the minor construction from an idiom: not have two Xs to rub together. The sequence of developments indicates that the loss of compositionality and analyzability of the construction is heavily influenced by context of use. When the idiom is used metaphorically for intellectual impoverishment, indicators of loss of compositionality begin to arise.

Published online: 17 July 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.12.22byb
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