Constructional contamination in morphology and syntax. Four case studies

peer reviewed ; In every-day language use, two or more structurally unrelated constructions may occasionally give rise to strings that look very similar on the surface. As a result of this superficial resemblance, a subset of instances of one of these constructions may deviate in the probabilistic preference for either of several possible formal variants. This effect is called ‘constructional contamination’, and was introduced in Pijpops and Van de Velde (2016). Constructional contamination bears testimony to the hypothesis that language users do not always execute a full parse of the utteranc... Mehr ...