CRC 1646

A04: Empirical profiles of grammatical creativity

A04 examines grammatical creativity, where speakers exploit their linguistic competence to create a new or modified grammatical unit that (i) fills a grammatical gap, (ii) resolves a grammatical conflict, (iii) expands the domain of use of a conventionalised construction or (iv) serves a specific communicative purpose. We will collect measures such as frequency, acceptability and reading times to investigate whether these classes of grammatical creativity have their own empirical characteristics, distinguishing them from each other and as a group from marked constructions. We will explore properties and the extent of the range of creative options in the domain of morphosyntax.