A quantitative measure of constructional contamination through superficial resemblance

peer reviewedThe construction, as a successor to the Saussurian sign, is usually envisaged as a discrete form-meaning pairing, with its meaning founded on formal oppositions to other constructions (de Saussure 1916; Goldberg 2006). In actual language use however, these oppositions may come under threat by superficial resemblances between constructions. (1) and (2) are corpus examples of two constructions that are structurally and etymologically unrelated and express different meanings. In (1), the adverb verkeerd (‘wrongly’) modifies the verb geïnterpreteerd (‘interpreted’). In (2), iets (‘something’) and verkeerd (‘wrong’) together form a noun phrase in a partitive genitive construction (Hoeksema 1998; Broekhuis and Strang 1996). In Dutch, partitive genitives may appear both with and without an -s ending on the adjective (cf. (2) and (3), Pijpops and Van de Velde 2014). Conversely, adverbs as in (1) cannot receive this -s ending. This means that only the superficial strings of (1) and (2) look alike, not the underlying syntactic structure. In fact, other instances of these constructions may look very different from one another. Still, we will quantitatively show that the realization of the -s ending in partitive genitives is affected by the frequent occurrence of constructions as in (1). (1) dat iets verkeerd geïnterpreteerd wordt? that something wrongly interpreted gets? ‘that something gets wrongly interpreted?’ (2) in begin van de week iets verkeerd gegeten, vandaar in beginning of the week something wrong-∅ eaten hence ‘I had eaten something wrong at the start of the weak, that’s why. (3) Ik had iets verkeerd-s gegeten en ik werd beroerd. I had something wrong-S eaten and I became ill ‘I had eaten something wrong and I became ill.’ Data were drawn from the ConDiv corpus of written Dutch (Grondelaers et al. 2000) and were analyzed primarily by means of logistic regression. It turned out that the effect described above even outperforms typically cited regional differences as a predictor of -s presence (van der Horst 2008: 1624–1625; Booij 2010: 224; Broekhuis 2013: 426). We claim that this contaminating influence is a result of chunking. That is, instead of analyzing utterances to the bone in interpretation, and building them from scratch in production, language users can make use of short-cuts by storing and accessing unanalyzed wholes (Dąbrowska 2012; Ferreira, Bailey and Ferraro 2002; Ferreira and Patson 2007). This then may cause the processing of instances like (1) and (2) to cross paths, resulting in constructional contamination