Abstract
The chapter investigates the creativity of the transitive into -ing pattern in current English, with data from the Corpus of American Soap Operas. An approach to identifying creative usages is outlined, and then applied to the corpus, which comprises some 100 million words. The creative usages are then analyzed into different syntactic types, and a class of what are termed “radically creative usages” is also identified. The pattern is viewed as a type of the caused-motion construction and the semantic properties of matrix verbs selecting the pattern creatively are also examined. The chapter contains numerous illustrations of creative usages and offers a framework for their investigation.
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Rudanko, J. (2017). Lexico-Grammatical Creativity in American Soap Operas: A Case Study of the Transitive into -ing Pattern. In: Infinitives and Gerunds in Recent English . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46313-1_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46313-1_5
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