How do speakers vary established patterns of language use and adapt them to novel contexts of
application? This study presents a usage-based approach to linguistic creativity: combining
detailed qualitative with large-scale quantitative analyses of corpus data it traces the
emergence of partial productivity in clusters of conventional collocations. Focusing on English
and German intensification constructions it proceeds in three steps: having first inventoried
the lexical means (of a given semantic type) that are recruited for signalling intensity in
both languages collostructional analysis is then used to identify entrenched intensity
collocations involving these formatives in three different syntactic constructions. Third
multi-rater manual classification methods as well as distribution-based automatic
classification methods are employed to uncover semantic generalisations over the attested types
on different levels of abstraction.Collocational expansion is shown to proceed through local
analogies within sets of semantically similar stored instances of a construction. Synthesising
insights from research on language acquisition variation and change it is thus argued that
creative extensions of linguistic conventions are intrinsically bound up with aspects of memory
and repetition.
