CRC 1646

A06: Rise and restriction of creative language use. Unsucessful creativity in German and Romance

A06 takes a cross-linguistic perspective to study the success and failure of creative language use on the collective level, focusing on Romance and German periphrastic verbal constructions propagated within a limited period and restricted to certain discursive and/or social contexts. We aim to thoroughly analyse the forms, the direct co-text (co-occurrence) and the wider context (genres and socio-pragmatic conditions) of these constructions to identify the mechanisms that underlie linguistic invention and the failure of creative language use in language change. Our methodology combines quantitative and qualitative corpus analyses using existing historical corpora of German and Romance.