Entrenchment inhibition: Constructional change and repetitive behaviour can be in competition with large-scale “recompositional” creativity

Abstract

This paper addresses creativity as inhibition of repetitive behaviour. We argue that entrenchment and constructional change can be in competition with large-scale creative attempts of recomposition of constructions’ internal constituency. After undergoing chunking, the recurrent usage of a construction may be significantly counterbalanced with new attempts of entrenchment inhibition (viz. inhibition of entrenchment). These are cases where speakers opt for more compositional and less predictable ways to express a similar meaning of a conventionalised form. We focus on the constructionalisation of noun–participle compounds (e.g. snow-covered) in the Historical Corpus of American English. During the second part of the twentieth century, speakers increasingly inhibit the usage of conventionalised noun phrase–past participle forms in favour of more compositional strategies involving the same internal constituents. This entails that constructional change not only affects the meaning of the chunk that undergoes constructionalisation but also the way speakers creatively rediscover its internal constituency. These results additionally aim to inform research in cognitive architectures and artificial intelligence, where creativity is often merely considered as a problem-solving mechanism rather than a potential process of inhibition of automatised behaviour.

Resonance and engagement through (dis-)agreement: Evidence of persistent constructional priming from Mandarin naturalistic interaction

“…This type of online alteration of a conventionalised construction is achieved by means of recomposition (Tantucci et al 2018;Tantucci & Di Cristofaro 2020a), viz. the semantic re-discovery of the internal constituency of a conventionalised construction x in the form of x +/-y, x being the original construction [I'll see you later] and y its online variation anyway.…”

Diachronic change of rapport orientation and sentence-periphery in Mandarin

“…Namely, the darker the blue colour, the more significant the ‘positive’ presence of CFP, while increasingly dark red bars indicate significant absence of it (cf. Tantucci and Di Cristofaro, 2019 on Pearson residuals and diachronic data).…”

“The Independence, Energy and Creative Talent of Carnival Can Do Other Wonders”

“…Still, the domain of cognitively orientated corpus linguistics is growing (i.a. Gries and Stefanowitsch 2006;and Stefanowitsch and Gries, 2006;Tantucci 2018;Tantucci & Di Cristofaro 2019). Meta-discussions on cognitive corpus linguistics often underpin the importance of converging evidence, and, hence, the interaction of corpora with other sources of data.…”