Linguistic creativity and productivity have become active topics of research, especially amongst scholars who employ insights from Construction Grammar (CxG) in their analyses. The question of how creativity should be defined and operationalized has in particular emerged as a major point of discussion and debate (e.g. Hoffmann 2018, 2024; Bergs 2018; Bergs & Kompa 2020), and the psychological, contextual and interactional factors that underlie creative language use have received a great deal of attention in recent work (e.g. Hoffmann 2018, 2020, 2024; Herbst 2018; Turner 2018; Hartmann & Ungerer 2023). These studies have substantially increased our understanding of linguistic creativity and productivity, but there are still many open questions about their mutual relationship as well as their connection to related phenomena, such as extravagance (Haspelmath 1999; Eitelmann & Haumann 2022; Trousdale & Norde 2025). In this special issue, the authors investigate a variety of questions related to creative language use and productivity, each providing new insights into the ongoing discussion of the nature of linguistic innovation in the context of English.

In this article, we consider the relationship between conceptual blending, creativity and morphological change, within the framework of Diachronic Construction Morphology (DCxM; Norde & Trousdale 2023). In particular, we suggest that a refinement to models of creativity in the literature might help to account better for different types of morphological change (Norde & Trousdale 2024). This is achieved via a contrastive analysis of two different sets of changes: (a) the creation of English libfixes (Zwicky 2010; Norde & Sippach 2019), e.g. snowmaggedon and spooktacular, and (b) the development of Dutch pseudoparticiples (Norde & Trousdale 2024), e.g. bebrild ‘bespectacled’ and ontstekkerd ‘with all plugs removed’.

This article is a theoretically oriented discussion of noticeable creative syntactic innovations. On the basis of three case studies (the ‘X-much’ construction (racist much?), the ‘extrasentential not’ construction (I like this movie. Not.) and the ‘because X’ construction (Can’t come to the party, because headache.)), we explore the idea that language users may deliberately create novel syntactic constructions by recycling and creatively blending existing constructions. At least two of the constructions discussed here (X much and extrasentential not) are probably not products of informal, natural daily language use, but may have originated (or at least have been propagated) in well-crafted, scripted media language geared towards younger audiences, who in turn have spread these constructions in their communities and beyond. Because X seems to have taken a slightly different route. The main motivations for these three rather noticeable creative innovations may be the Maxim of Extravagance and the Maxim of Wittiness, in Keller’s (1994) sense. We suspect that because X is perhaps less noticeable, or deviant, and pragmatically more complex than the other two constructions, which provides their speakers with more ‘syntactic fireworks’.

This article examines the notions of productivity and creativity with respect to complex verbs in English. Verb-forming suffixation involves the attachment of the suffixes ‑ize, ‑ify, -en and -ate to a base to form complex verbs such as hospitalize, densify, sharpen and hyphenate. Sampson (2016) describes productive processes that conform to existing patterns as F-creativity, or Fixed-creativity, and those that deviate from those patterns as E-creativity, or Enlarging/Extending creativity; Bergs (2018) and Uhrig (2018) view the F–E dichotomy as a cline. Coercion effects can account for linguistic productivity and creativity; Audring & Booij (2016) propose that the coercive mechanisms of Selection, Enrichment and Override lie on a unified continuum. This article integrates the F–E creativity and coercion continua, and analyses a database of conventionalized and recently coined complex verbs (Laws 2023) for instances of coercion. The results reveal that coercive mechanisms, particularly Selection and Enrichment, facilitate productivity and creativity in more complex constructional schemas underlying verbal derivatives, and that these coercive patterns have become increasingly more entrenched over time. E-creativity of complex verbs is defined here as ‘Unruly’ coercion and the nature of attested examples is discussed.

Approaches to creativity commonly distinguish between F-creativity (rule-compliant use) and E-creativity (rule-breaking use). This dichotomy in part stems from a focus on grammatical constructions (‘nodes’) at the relative expense of their connections (‘links’). We approach creativity and productivity from a link-based perspective in Usage-Based Construction Grammar, and assume that productivity pertains to a unit’s inventory of links, while creativity pertains to the creation and maintenance of links. These assumptions are showcased using the into-causative (He talked me into going, They scared us into working harder). The construction is productive because it hosts a large inventory of verbal slot-fillers (talk, scare). Conversely, these slot-fillers themselves are creative because they can establish and maintain links with a construction that is not their primary host. This property is not linear: we assume that the slot-fillers’ ability to occur in unusual constructional environments reflects their general ‘creative potential’ to form and maintain (new) links within the network. In data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), we find weak, but consistent correlations between verbs’ association with the into-causative and (i) their semantic and syntactic compatibility with the construction, and, crucially, (ii) their general flexibility and ability to establish and maintain links.

Semantic extensibility captures the semantic side of productivity. It is the likelihood that a given sense of a linguistic expression will support extension to new senses. Even though linguistic expressions are naturally polysemous, semantic extensibility is constrained. In previous literature, it has been argued that semantic extensions are motivated by mostly one-directional conceptual operations such as metaphor and metonymy, and that in any polysemous expression only one or a few so-called ‘sanctioning’ senses have privileged status in supporting new extensions. One factor believed to determine sanctioning status is high frequency. Drawing on three case studies from the history of English, involving change in the adjective awful, the preposition and adverb about and the multifunctional item so, this article provides diachronic evidence from semantic loss to support this view. On the one hand, it is shown that when old sanctioning senses go into decline, this also impacts the senses derived from them, underscoring the motivational relations that tie extended senses to sanctioning senses. On the other hand, what typically initiates a decline in a sanctioning sense is a frequency increase elsewhere in the polysemy network coincident with the emergence of a new sanctioning sense, underscoring the role of frequency in determining sanctioning status and the directionality of sanctioning relations.

This article presents an exploratory study of an innovative future adverb construction, going forward, typically meaning ‘in the future, from now on’ (e.g. What does this mean going forward?). Going forward probably originated in the domain of business in or around the 1970s. In this study, the spread of going forward is examined on the basis of over 1,500 examples from six genres of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), covering the years 1990–2019. The data is analysed in terms of four morphosyntactic variables, and the developments in the frequency of going forward are analysed using variability-based neighbour clustering. The results show that, in the 1990s, going forward had a modest rate of occurrence mainly in texts having to do with business and finance, but its frequency rose sharply in the 2000s and the 2010s. At the same time, the discourse contexts in which it appeared broadened from business and finance to other domains. The syntactic contexts of going forward show that it has become an adverb. The results highlight the need to incorporate social meanings such as domain preferences in the description of grammatical constructions. They also illustrate the need to consider constructional innovations at the lexical end of the grammar–lexicon continuum, in addition to highly grammaticalised constructions.

This article focuses on the poster child of grammaticalization, be going to V. First expressing ‘motion with intention’, in Early Modern English the construction came to signify ‘motionless intention’. The grammaticalization process continued in Late Modern English with subjectification, so that ‘intention’ was gradually replaced by ‘prediction’. We study the process from Late Modern to Present-Day English in the 200-million-word fiction section of the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), 1810–2009, for which we have gender metadata on the authors. We focus on the productivity of the construction by comparing type frequencies, i.e., the number of different verbs following be going to. Our research questions are how the grammaticalization is reflected in the productivity of the construction, and whether the social factor of gender played a role in the process. We study the internal factors of mental verbs, inanimate subjects and passive voice; to this end, we use robust statistical methods to compare type frequencies and proportions of types over time. We also investigate the semantics of the verb types by drawing on techniques from distributional semantics. Our wider aim is to enrich the cognitively oriented theory of Construction Grammar with insights from historical sociolinguistics.

This article provides a Construction Grammar (CxG) analysis of the Complex Modifier Construction (CMC) in English and an investigation of its productivity in World Englishes with a particular focus on African and South-East Asian Englishes. By examining data from the Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE), we seek to establish whether the productivity of the construction correlates with the developmental phase of the variety of English in Schneider’s Dynamic Model of Postcolonial Englishes, or whether language contact, and particularly the typological profiles of the local substrate languages (head-initial versus head-final syntax), affects productivity. We find that evolutionary progress is indeed a relevant factor insofar as the most advanced ‘Inner Circle’ varieties are concerned, but we also observe substantially lower productivity in the African varieties of English when compared to the South-East Asian Englishes represented in the corpus. As the main substrate languages in the African countries under study have head-initial syntax and those in the South-East Asian countries head-final syntax, we conclude that the productivity of complex premodifiers is affected by the multilingual situation in these regions and propose that language contact should be considered more closely as an explanatory factor in future studies of constructional productivity in World Englishes.