Incipient Productivity

How do speakers vary established patterns of language use and adapt them to novel contexts of application? This study presents a usage-based approach to linguistic creativity: combining detailed qualitative with large-scale quantitative analyses of corpus data, it traces the emergence of partial productivity in clusters of conventional collocations. Synthesising insights from research on language acquisition, variation and change, it is argued that creative extensions of linguistic conventions are intrinsically bound up with aspects of memory and repetition.