Читать книгу Collocations, Creativity and Constructions - Cordula Glass - Страница 8

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 approaches onto the discipline of diachronic language research, as well as sociolinguistic studies. At the same time, these advances show that, while rather comprehensive at every level of a linguistic system, construction grammar has a tendency to focus on more or less isolated constructions. Thus, it needs to remind itself that contextual factors like time in general, as well as a speaker’s age, education or social class might influence the outcome of a study.

Still, as has been mentioned previously, creative alternations of collocations tend to be the exception rather than the norm, hence, not every speaker might use or even tolerate the same level of creative language. For the comprehension of complex syntactic constructions, for example, Dąbrowska15 (1997) was able to show that native speakers’ acceptance diverged drastically, based on the educational background of the participants. In Chipere (2003) as well as Dąbrowska and Street (2006), non-native speakers even outperformed their native speaker counterparts in a task on the comprehension and recall of complex sentences and acceptability of plausible and implausible sentences. Thus, the connection between a collocation and its more creative alternations might be able to tell us something about the nature of collocations as such, and also serve as an indicator for potential stages of mental processing in language attainment. As they are generally constructed according to common syntactical patterns (like [Adj+N] or [VP+NP]) but apparently restricted combinatorially, collocations can neither be seen as a purely syntactical, nor as a clearly lexical phenomenon. They operate on an in-between level, which makes them a challenging subject for any comprehensive model of language.

However, since to date most studies have focused either on highly frequent combinations or collocations which were approved by academically trained evaluators16, the status of more creative alternations ranges from deviant exceptions to creative instances of language use. Only rarely has creative language use been seen as a potential next step in an ongoing language development process. But in recent years, advances in usage-based theories and construction grammar have resulted in a new perspective on language acquisition and development. Seeing language as a continuum of ongoing change, several linguists began to approach language as a dynamic, complex adaptive system (Ellis/Larsen-Freeman 2009; Larsen-Freeman/Cameron 2008), which forms structures and abstractions from the input of its environment but also contributes to a steady change by feeding new and sometimes novel or creative utterances into the system. Thus, these approaches share the assumption that the human brain shapes structures and potentially, even rules, based on the input it receives. These structures are then combined to form new utterances. Here, studies in morphology (Bybee 1995) and syntax (Ambridge/Goldberg 2008; Tomasello 2005) have already been able to show that analogy plays a crucial role when it comes to the (re)combination of established items and structures, which might also be responsible for the development of novel and creative combinations. Yet, while morphology and syntax are traditionally regarded as a rule-based system with only a few idiosyncrasies, collocations are often defined by their idiomatic and unpredictable nature. As mentioned before, they could, therefore, be seen as in-between phenomena, which would make them interesting structures to fathom the interaction and effects of linguistic innovation and convention.

Therefore, this study seeks to investigate the constructional potential of collocations and also whether creative alternation within a collocational combination could lead to its manifestation as a construction. While context- and significance-oriented approaches alike have treated collocations as descriptively interesting exceptions, this text approaches the phraseological phenomenon from a (language) attainment point of view. Partly inspired by previous studies on semantic prosody (Stewart 2010; Sinclair 2004, 1991; Partington 2004; 1998; Bublitz 1995; Louw 1993), it argues that, to a certain extent, collocations, creativity, and constructions could also be interpreted as different stages of linguistic development. The following pages are based on the idea that, not unlike coins, which, in fact, are three-dimensional objects, collocations have often been approached from two angles: as a partly opaque, phraseological phenomenon, or as a rather interesting frequency effect (Granger/Paquot 2008; Bartsch 2004; Herbst 1996). A third dimension, consisting of temporal and social context, which, like the rim of a coin, might link both sides, has thus far gained little attention. This missing link could be found by looking at the genesis of individual collocational phenomena. But a closer examination of collocational creativity against a usage-based, constructional background is not just interesting from a purely theoretical point of view. Since English today is widely regarded as a key competence, not only in terms of vocational expertise but also as an essential skill in an increasingly private sphere which is becoming ever more global and international, the need to use and understand English correctly is still growing. In the last decades, a plethora of studies has already shown that, because of their seemingly unpredictable character, collocations are one of the most challenging phenomena for non-native speakers of English (amongst others: Howarth 1996; Granger 1998; Nesselhauff 2004; de Cock 2004). With seemingly arbitrary syntagmatic as well as paradigmatic restrictions, they operate outside the traditional “slot-filler model” (Sinclair 1991: 109). Against this background, items such as collocations, which do not allow for any random lexical filling within a syntactical structure, have to be memorized. Hence, even more advanced learners struggle with native-like English phrasing and might at times despair, since they might have been marked down for using combinations such as pretty man or commit a mistake, while native speakers seem to be allowed to use them, although admittedly only under certain circumstances. Thus, the three focal research questions (RQ) of this study are:

RQ1:	Are collocations a cognitively stored entity, and if so, how can this perspective be adequately described in a comprehensive model of collocational combinations?
RQ2a:	Is there a unified process underlying the attainment of collocational proficiency?
RQ2b:	Does the collocational proficiency of native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers of English develop in the same way?
RQ3:	What role do the factors ‘creativity’ and ‘context’ play for the acceptability and analysis of collocational phenomena?

To approach these questions, the following pages deal with a more detailed discussion of the subject matter, collocations (> 2), as well as creativity and contextual change (> 3). Here the emphasis lies on the concepts themselves, and their theoretical background, as well as their position in modern (cognitive) language attainment research, to extrapolate which factors might contribute to the acceptance of creativity and whether these could be used to explain a collocation’s creative alternation. Together with chapter 4, they contribute to RQ 1. Introducing a first cognitive conception of collocation (> 2) and discussing how and why change and creativity can be seen as a cognitive faculty (> 3), they lay the foundations for a more comprehensive model of collocation as a cognitive phenomenon within the process of language attainment (> 4). Thus, chapter 4 zooms in on the question of how approaches to language acquisition can contribute to RQ 1, and how these support a more comprehensive picture of the potential connections between collocations, creativity, and constructions. Combining different usage-based approaches towards phraseological phenomena (> 4.3), this Dynamic Model for the Cognitive Development of Collocations (DMCDC-model; > 4.4) is then put to a initial test in the subsequent chapters. In order to lay the methodological groundwork for RQs 2 and 3, chapter 5 is concerned with ways to operationalise the theoretical considerations from chapters 2 to 4 and discusses which measures need to be taken in order to be able to investigate differences between first and second language speakers as well as the role contextual factors might play. This methodology is then applied and discussed in chapters 6 and 7. Finally, chapter 8 lays out this study’s major findings and implications. Figure 1.1 illustrates the outline of the present study.

Figure 1.1: Scope of this Study