Individual differences in productivity: intra- and extralinguistic determinants in evaluations of “creative” uses of grammatical patterns

Abstract

In light of the partial productivity puzzle (see e.g., Goldberg 2019 for a recent discussion), recent work in Construction Grammar has explored the connection between constructional productivity and linguistic creativity (i.a., Hoffmann 2018, 2019, 2020a; Bergs 2019). While current research into productivity has been mainly concerned with intralinguistic determinants such as type/token frequency and semantic similarity, the present study demonstrates the relevance of including individual, user-related variables as potential extralinguistic determinants of linguistic creativity. Using an acceptability rating experiment focussing on two Dutch argument structure constructions as a case study, we explore individual differences in productivity. The findings indicate considerable inter-individual variation in the extent to which speakers evaluate productive/creative instantiations of the patterns at stake positively or negatively. The results of ordinal regression analyses reveal (i) that participants’ ratings are influenced by their social backgrounds, linguistic experiences, and personality traits, and (ii) that intralinguistic and extralinguistic variables are inextricably linked to each other.