Читать книгу Collocations, Creativity and Constructions - Cordula Glass - Страница 13

Establishing and maintaining a balance between formulaicity and creativity seems to be essential for successful acquisition, but in taught adults, this is difficult to achieve, with the learner most often erring on the side of too much creativity.

(Wray 2002: 148–149)

As the previous chapter showed, the observation that even phraseologically fixed items such as idioms or collocations can be subject to change was already part of early linguistic work on these aspects. Palmer and Hornby present different, at times antonymous, NP-collocates in their collection for Thousand-Word English, for a verb like do, for example, they include “do good, harm, etc.” (Palmer/Hornby 1937: 43). Later, Cowie even uses the number of lexical choices within a collocation as a defining feature of his categorization (> 2.2; Cowie/Howarth 1995). Also more context-oriented approaches, like most of Sinclair’s corpus-based studies, take into account that there is more than one option for a collocate to be realised (> 2.1). So, while variation and a varying degree of fixedness have been part of collocational studies almost since the very beginning, it is interesting to note that the conclusions drawn from these observations have mostly been very pragmatic: the different forms of collocational variation were acknowledged as a defining, yet unpredictable, feature and hence not analysed any further. Some publications, however, have gone beyond these rather straighforward observations. Concepts like lexical sets (Halliday 1966), semantic prosody (Sinclair 1996, 1998, 2004; Louw 1993), commutability (Howarth 1996), lexical priming (Hoey 2005) and exploitations (Hanks 2013) all account to varying degree for the fact that variation in collocations is not only possible but can also lead to further implications. This chapter will discuss a selection of more traditional views on collocational variation (> 3.1). It furthermore discusses how these observations can be interpreted against a cognitive linguistic background (> 3.2), showing in more detail how creative variability could support a constructional perspective on collocations.