Collocations, Creativity and Constructions

A Usage-based Study of Collocations in Language Attainment

Cordula Glass

• Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783823301233
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

Approaching collocations from a usage-based perspective, this study investigates how the development of collocational proficiency in first and second language attainment could be explained. Against the background of recent approaches in cognitive linguistics such as construction grammar and Complex Adaptive Systems it argues that collocations should not be regarded as idiosyncratic phraseological items, which, depending on their degree of fixedness and semantic opaqueness, can be classified along a gradient of idiomaticity. Thus, this study regards collocations as dynamic linguistic phenomena, which could be seen as subject to constant change rather than more or less static combinations with an additional level of syntagmatic and paradigmatic restrictions. Furthermore it explores how creative changes and alternations of collocations can be used to learn more about a speakers cognitive processing of these phraseological phenomena and how this process might be influenced by language external factors such as age, education or context.

1 Three sides of the same coin? – Collocations, Creativity, Constructions

Putting together novel expressions is something that speakers do, not grammars. It is a problem-solving activity that requires a constructive effort on the part of a speaker and occurs when he puts linguistic convention to use in specific circumstances.

(Langacker 1987: 85)

Speakers, as Langacker (1987: 85) points out, form one of the key elements of a language. Not only are they the force that brings a language to life but also the motor to shape conventions and create new expressions, phrases, or even grammatical constructions. Even aspects of language which are traditionally defined through their invariability or at least partial fixedness, such as idioms or collocations, are not immune to creative alternations and change, as sentences1 (1) to (3) show.

(1)	BNC K51 1683	Politicians seem to work on the assumption that the early bird catches the voter.
(2)	BNC CJA 2253	[…] and Tabitha was captivated despite herself, watching the pretty man play and wondering how he would end it, how he could ever resolve the disagreement between the rush and the ebb […]
(3)	BNC H8H 1277	Now I have, and I'm telling you that if you marry him then you'll be committing the biggest mistake in your brief little life.

This conflict between fixedness and change forms the basis for this study. The following pages focus on the apparent tension between established, idiomatic items, and creative alternations, which ultimately cause a language to change and evolve. Since idioms2, like the early bird catches the worm, are usually considered to function more or less as one complex, rather invariant, unit of meaning, which is made up of several words3 but expresses a unified concept, it might seem rather surprising to find creative alternations as in (1). However, collocations, like pretty woman or commit a crime4, play an even more interesting role. Most definitions (> 2) would, in fact, agree that the essence of this phraseological phenomenon is a strong, partly inexplicable, bond, which seems to link all items within a collocation. In fact, these collocates were often argued to be so closely associated that the thought or perception of one collocate almost automatically seems to somehow activate the other(s)5, like commit would trigger a word such as crime, while pretty is likely to elicit woman. Therefore, to talk about creative, “novel expressions” in the context of collocations seems to be counter-intuitive at first. Nevertheless, for most definitions a second decisive feature of collocations is a certain degree of flexibility within their components, as in pretty woman, with alternations like pretty girl or pretty face, or commit which, amongst others, can also be found with offence or act. In some cases, these collocational combinations can then even extend to rather unlikely or even novel, yet decodable, combinations like pretty man or commit a mistake.

However, as the examples in (2) and (3) show, a pretty man is not necessarily the same as the linguistically much more frequent6 handsome man. Furthermore, if one commits a mistake, this is very unlikely to be the same kind of act as in to make a mistake; and a pretty man tends to be associated with rather female features or behaviour, often used in a derogatory or objectified way, like for example the suitor of the emancipated and self-confident protagonist7 in sentence (2). A mistake which is committed, on the other hand, is very likely to be a euphemistic phrasing to refer to a serious offence or, as in (3), a similarly life-changing, yet wrong, decision. In these cases pretty and commit seem to coerce their respective noun phrases (NP) into a reading which is much closer to their established collocational meaning than to the more common combinations with handsome or make. In past publications on collocations, these examples have been treated as separate phenomena. They have either been classified as some kind of deliberate, creative, literary form of language use (cf. Hausmann 1984 on counter-creations), more or less brushed aside as lexical idiosyncrasies or peripheral phenomena8 (Chomsky 1965, Palmer 1976, Klotz 1998) or have not been mentioned at all. One notable exception is Mackin (1978), who advocates for a lexicographical description of phraseological language which not only focuses on the prototypical form of an idiom or collocation but also takes into account creative alternations, which he calls nonce uses (Mackin 1978: 163–164). Also, comprehensive studies9 on collocations tend to focus on high frequent or highly associated collocational pairs. This leaves more creative versions out of the picture, since, if viewed individually, for example in a large corpus like the British National Corpus (BNC10), they are often a low-frequency phenomenon. Even in association measures like mutual information (MI), these combinations lose out against rare collocates, like cottage-residence or hara-kiri. At the same time, these non-standard alternations of collocations are particularly interesting, because they are infrequent yet not incomprehensible, which shows that, to a certain extent, creativity and change need a base of established linguistic structures to be interpreted against. The most basic level which could be assumed would, of course, be simple syntactic rules in a traditional grammar-lexicon model (Chomsky 1965). Here, it would be argued that the examples of pretty man and commit a mistake are but a mere combination of two lexical items which are formed ad hoc on the basis of established syntactical structures, such as adjective plus noun, [Adj+N]11, or verb phrase plus noun phrase in object position, [VP+NP]. Still, this does not explain why these words are then interpreted against the background of a related, more established, actual collocation. Therefore, these instances beg the question, whether the interpretation of these creative word combinations might not indeed be cognitively supported by more common, entrenched collocational pairs. This connection, however, would imply that the reason different collocations operate on a gradient spectrum of fixedness is not just a linguistic fact or even coincidence, but that the degree of variability might depend on other factors, like the frequency of input or cognitive entrenchment12.

Moreover, as our first interpretation of combinations like pretty man or commit a mistake demonstrated, these creative alternations might support approaches which suggest that not only traditional lexical items, such as words or compounds, but also more abstract constructions, such as [pretty+N] or [commit+NP], could have their own level of meaning. In the last decades, several cognitive and constructionist13 approaches developed which have explicitly or implicitly committed themselves to this idea and thus regard language as a network of elements consisting of a formal as well as a functional side. Furthermore, they also see a speaker as the user as well as a source of linguistic innovation, and thus no longer distinguish between more or less normative language competence and a speaker’s actual performance. Therefore, they instead see both the language and its speakers as inseparable parts of a dynamic system14. One prominent branch is usage-based theories, which have already been able to show specific effects of linguistic input and frequency on language attainment (Bybee 2010; Ellis 2006; Tomasello 2005; Bybee/Hopper 2001). Another school of thought, construction grammar, developed in recent decades and focuses explicitly on language as a system of form-function pairings, so-called constructions (Ziem/Lasch 2013; Goldberg 2006, 1995). In both these approaches, the dual role of a language user as the recipient as well as the source of linguistic conventions and change holds a central role. More recently, concepts such as constructionalisation (Traugott 2015; Traugott/Trousdale 2013; Hilpert 2008) or cognitive sociolinguistics (Hollman 2013; Grondelaers/Speelman/Geeraerts 2007) then fruitfully applied the method and concepts of constructionist appr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titel
• Impressum
• Inhaltsverzeichnis
• For Hannelore and Manfred ...
• Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Three sides of the same coin? – Collocations, Creativity, Constructions
• 2 Collocations as Constructions
• 3 Collocations and Creativity
• 4 Creating Linguistic Creativity
• 5 Measuring Collocations – Methodological Considerations
• 6 CollMatch
• 7 CollJudge
• 8 Main Results and Implications
• Appendices
• References
• Fußnoten