Coin it up: generalization of creative constructions in the wild
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2021•escholarship.org
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 actual language use. Our second …
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 actual language use. Our second …
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 actual 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.
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