Publication
Title
Constructional contamination: how does it work and how do we measure it?
Author
Abstract
In this article, we introduce the effect of “constructional contamination”. In constructional contamination, a subset of the instances of a target construction deviate in their realization, due to a superficial resemblance they share with instances of a contaminating construction. We claim that this contaminating effect bears testimony to the hypothesis that language users do not always execute a full parse while interpreting and producing sentences. Instead, they may rely on what has been called “shallow parsing”, i. e., chunking the utterances into large, unanalyzed exemplars that may extend across constituent borders. We propose several measures to quantify constructional contamination in corpus data. To evaluate these measures, the Dutch partitive genitive is taken under scrutiny as a target construction of constructional contamination. In this case study, it is shown that neighboring constructions play a crucial role in determining the presence or absence of the
Language
English
Source (journal)
Folia linguistica / Linguistic Society of Europe [Amsterdam] - The Hague
Publication
The Hague : 2016
ISSN
0165-4004 [paper]
1614-7308 [online]
DOI
10.1515/FLIN-2016-0020
Volume/pages
50 :2 (2016) , p. 543-581
Full text (Publisher's DOI)
Full text (publisher's version - intranet only)
UAntwerpen
Publication type
Subject
External links
Record
Identifier
Creation 19.10.2023
Last edited 19.10.2023
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