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.

A perennial problem for sociolinguists interested in morphosyntactic variation is that such forms are often low frequency, making quantitative analysis difficult or impossible. However, sociolinguists have been generally reluctant to adopt methodologies from syntax, such as acceptability data gleaned from speaker intuition, due to the belief that these judgments are not necessarily reliable. In this article we present data from the Scots Syntax Atlas, which employs sociolinguistic methodologies in spoken data alongside the results of acceptability judgments. We target three morphosyntactic variables and compare and contrast these across the two data types in order to assess the reliability of the judgment data at community level. The results show that reliability is variable-dependent. For some variables, there is clear correlation; with others, it appears that, as Labov (1996) phrased it, ‘intuitions fail’. We discuss how factors such as salience, social stigma and local identity combine to govern the reliability of judgment data.

The article looks at instances of specialisation for specific linguistic contexts in ‘command’ and ‘inference’ uses of will and must. It tests the feasibility of different motivations for this specialisation, such as statistical and construal pre-emption. It also proposes a new motivation for specialisation, polysemous pre-emption, i.e. whether a strongly entrenched polyseme of a given expression might pre-empt the use of an expression with a less strongly entrenched polyseme. The investigation uses corpus analysis and distinctive collexeme analysis to test the three motivations (statistical, construal, and polysemous pre-emption). The results show that all instances of specialisation with will and must could be explained through construal pre-emption and/or polysemous pre-emption, thus making recourse to statistical pre-emption unnecessary.

Recent research shows that, even under direct insertion, loan verbs are subject to constraints: for instance, they enter non-finite categories more readily than finite categories. To deepen our understanding of such loan word accommodation biases we investigate two contact situations to test whether biases hold in contact between closely related languages. A corpus study on Norse and French loan verbs entering Middle English compares the proportions of their finite and non-finite usage to gauge the impact of etymology and temporal distance to direct contact on loan integration. We identify significant bias towards non-finite use for both etymologies, but it is stronger for French than for Norse loan verbs. This suggests that biases are stronger in some contexts than in others: they are more prominent at a smaller temporal distance to direct contact and in contact between languages that are less closely related.

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’.

Modal concord refers to the phenomenon where the co-occurrence of two modal elements with the same flavor and force (e.g. may possibly, must certainly) gives rise to the interpretation of single modality. Given their (arguably) equivalent semantics, constructions with modal concord and single modal (e.g. may, must) can function as alternative choices in different contexts of use – how do speakers choose between them, and how is the choice perceived? In this article, we take a ‘Register’ approach and report an experimental study of MC in US English, addressing their linguistic and social meanings with versus without situational context. The results show that (i) modal concord constructions differ from single modal ones in linguistic meanings, which casts doubt on the concord assumption, and (ii) modal concord has distinct social meanings from those of single modal constructions. Our findings suggest a correlation between the meaning strength of a linguistic expression and the social perception about the speaker. Context, manipulated via the single situational parameter of interlocutor relation (close vs. distant), did not interact with the linguistic or social meaning of modal concord constructions, the implications of which are discussed in relation to the multidimensional nature of conversational situations and the method applied.

One of the questions that still surrounds the history of auxiliary do is what function it had during the Middle English period (c.1100–1500). Scholars have put forward different hypotheses, suggesting that it could serve, among others, as a perfective marker (Denison 1985), agentive marker (Ecay 2015) and habitual marker (Garrett 1998). The present article reports on a quantitative study that aims to shed further light on this issue. By means of a collexeme analysis, this article investigates the semantic features of the infinitives that occur with auxiliary do in several Middle English corpora. The results show that auxiliary do was not connected to verbs with specific semantic profiles, but it was employed in different contexts and had various functions. Specifically, the data suggest that auxiliary do was used (i) as an accommodation tool to facilitate the use of low-frequency verbs, particularly of French origin, and (ii) as an aspectual particle to mark both perfectivity and habituality. It is argued that the multifunctionality of auxiliary do in Middle English played a crucial role in the preservation of the construction before it spread to the NICE (i.e. negation, inversion, code and emphasis) environments.

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’.

English morphosyntactic agreement, such as determiner–noun agreement in These cabs broke down and noun–verb agreement in The cabs break down, has a few interesting properties that enable us to investigate whether agreement has a psycholinguistic function, that is, whether it helps the listener process linguistic information expressed by a speaker. The present project relies on these properties in a perception experiment, examines the two aforementioned types of English agreement, and aims at analyzing whether and how native English listeners benefit from agreement. The two types of agreement were contrasted with cases without any overtly agreeing elements (e.g. The cabs broke down). Native speakers of English with normal hearing heard short English sentences in quiet and in more or less intense white noise and were requested to indicate whether the second word of the sentence (e.g. These cabs broke down) was a singular or plural noun. Accuracy was entered as the response variable in the binomial logistic regression model. Results showed that overt determiner–noun agreement clearly increased response accuracy, while noun–verb agreement had at best marginal effects. The findings are interpreted against the background of functional aspects of linguistic structures in English, in the context of unfavorable listening conditions in particular.

The English modals have been used as case studies in many domains of linguistic enquiry. Their diachronic development and patterns of synchronic variation in historical and contemporary corpora have been used to develop theories of linguistic representation, to further understanding of correlations between structure and use, and to investigate relationships between form and meaning. However, much of this research explores only the modals themselves: relatively little attention has been given to the study of modal collocations. In this article, we explore variation and change in collocational patterns of two modals (may and might) when they appear directly adjacent to the adverb well. Our analysis is corpus based, using quantitative data to explore macro-level trends in recent American English, and qualitative analysis to explore micro-level variation, particularly with regard to the development of concessive uses of may and might, and post-modal meanings more generally. We foreground the idea that modals show subtly different diachronic trends in specific collocations compared to perceived trends when looked at as an isolated class of auxiliary verbs.

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.

This article examines the diachronic development of hedged performatives (HP) in spoken American English. HPs (e.g. I have to say, I must admit) combine a (semi-)modal verb and a performative verb, and were first analyzed by Fraser (1975). While subsequent research has investigated their discursive functions and established them as ‘constructions’, their diachronic development has not been analyzed within a Construction Grammar perspective. This article addresses this gap using three corpora: the TV Corpus, Movie Corpus and spoken COCA. We investigate fifteen HPs formed with three modals (have to, must, can), first sketching a constructional network with a macro-level ([I + MODAL + Vperf]), modal-specific meso-level (e.g. [I must Vperf]) and micro-level (e.g. [I must say]). Results show different diachronic trends at the meso-level: [I must Vperf] declines, [I have to Vperf] increases, and [I can Vperf] remains stable. These trends diverge from those of the base modals, confirming their constructional status. For must and have to HPs, change operates primarily at the meso-level, driven by evolving discourse norms. At the micro-level, must/have to HPs follow the meso-level trend, while can HPs show more variation. Finally, HPs are overrepresented in scripted speech, although diachronic trends remain consistent across registers.

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.

We investigate a class of adjective phrases composed of a deadjectival adverb ending in -ly and an adjective head (e.g. staggeringly incompetent, absolutely terrific, fiscally responsible), a compact construction whereby two adjectives may jointly contribute to evaluative meaning. Using corpus methodologies on more than 1 million examples and relying on semantic analyses of about 1,000 instances, we propose that the construction can be divided into different semantic subtypes, including Degree (deeply disturbing), Focus (utterly ridiculous), Manner (delightfully performed), Reaction (strangely compelling), Topical (historically inaccurate) and Epistemic (intuitively obvious), among others. Using this typology, we investigate the relative distribution of each subtype across several registers of written English. We found a high frequency of the Reaction subtype in book, film and art reviews, and we suggest a discourse-functional explanation for this, linked to the perceived value of originality in expressive writing. This investigation reveals the power of semantically informed, corpus methodologies to shed light on the distribution of specific constructions.

This article explores intraspeaker malleability in the realisation of the first-person possessive in the North-East of England ([maɪ], versus [mi] and [ma]). The analysis relies on a combination of a trend sample and a novel dynamic panel corpus that covers the entire adult lifespan. While [mi] has been around at least since the 1970s on Tyneside, [ma] appears to have made its way into the system during the 1980s and 1990s. The panel data add intraspeaker information to this ongoing change, revealing a turnover in the proportional usage of possessive variants between two recordings that are on average ten years apart. Regression modelling provides differentiated information about intraspeaker changes across the lifespan, suggesting that, with only a few exceptions, intraspeaker grammars are stable across the lifespan. The analysis supports recent panel research that has argued for the importance of considering the socio-demographic trajectory of the individual: while speakers who are part of the ‘marché scolaire’ (Bourdieu & Boltanski 1975: 7) orient towards the standard, speakers working as professional carers (e.g. nurses) tend to retain high rates of the reduced variants across their lifespans to do local identity work and establish better interpersonal relations with their clients.

While literature on English modality has usually focused on traditional modal and semi-modal verbs, to our knowledge, no attention has ever been given to the emerging be having to (BHT) construction. Through corpus analysis conducted on GloWbE, ICE, BNC and CLMET, this article investigates the semantic differences between have to and BHT that make them distinct in the English constructicon. We demonstrate that BHT conveys meanings of contingency, reluctance and inchoativity, and propose that its recent emergence may stem from a specific functional gap within the English modal system. While have to appears to be gradually grammaticalizing with future-oriented functions, BHT seems to be renewing the original (and less grammaticalized) dynamic functions of have to. Finally, we explore the productivity of the construction across different English varieties and the reasons for its lower frequency in postcolonial varieties. The hypothesis of negative retentionism proposes that a feature that was absent in the lexifier language at the time of contact may indeed be found to be less frequently used in the contact variety at a later stage due to colonial lag.

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 explores the variation surrounding the semi-modals be going to and gonna. While gonna is frequently mentioned alongside be going to, it remains under-described in traditional grammars and academic literature. However, recent studies within Construction Grammar suggest that gonna may represent an independent construction, prompting a reconsideration of other variants within the be going to / gonna paradigm such as gon and imma, which appear to derive directly from gonna and no longer from be going to. In light of recent work, what have traditionally been regarded as mere ‘phonetic realizations’ or ‘orthographic variants’ may in fact play a more significant role in the formation and definition of constructions, raising questions about the structure of constructional networks. This article analyzes the immediate syntactic environment of the variants to account for both the variation of forms and the status of such forms. The study is conducted using two corpora that are particularly prone to showing linguistic innovations and language change: a spontaneous spoken corpus and a web corpus. Findings indicate that shorter variants often involve elision of be and that gonna is more grammaticalized than going to, based on the types of verbs they precede.