Coin it up: Generalization of creative constructions in the wild

Julia Watson, Barend Beekhuizen, Suzanne Stevenson

Abstract:

Language is inherently flexible: people continually generalize
over observed data to produce creative linguistic expressions.
This process is constrained by a wide range of factors, whose
interaction is not fully understood. We present a novel study
of the creative use of verb constructions “in the wild”, in a
very large social media corpus. Our first experiment confirms
on this large-scale data the important interaction of category

variability and item similarity within creative extensions in ac-
tual language use. Our second experiment confirms the novel

hypothesis that low-frequency exemplars may play a role in
generalization by signaling the area of semantic space where
creative coinages occur.