Exploring the productivity of minimizing constructions : a corpus-based study of Dutch and French

This study investigates the productivity, or lexical range, of the minimizing construction in present-day Dutch and French. Minimizers, such as 'woord' and 'poil' in the examples 'geen woord begrijpen; not understand a WORD’ and 'ne pas bouger d’un poil; not move for a HAIR’, refer to a minimal amount or value on a given pragmatic scale and can be used to strengthen the negation of the sentence. They are part of the minimizing construction, which also consists of the following obligatory slots: an element of negation ('geen' and 'pas'), a predicate, and, in French, an article. The analysis is based on data from comparable web corpora. 244 Dutch and 124 French minimizers are distinguished, and the final dataset consists of 6,224 Dutch and 3,102 French instances. Based on their meaning, minimizers can be divided into several groups, which are comparable across both languages. The biggest difference is situated within the category of taboo minimizers, which appear frequently only in Dutch. Additionally, many creative extensions are found, based on analogy with existing minimizers, and often embedded in a specific context. An analysis of the predicates the minimizers co-occur with shows that analogy is an important mechanism within the constructional network. This is evident, for example, for the Dutch taboo minimizers, which are often combined with the same, relatively limited group of predicates. Minimizers frequently occur with predicates in line with their referential meaning. Some minimizers, such as 'millimeter', also exhibit forms of semantic expansion, such as metaphorical extensions or combinations with the most prototypical predicates of the construction at the macro-level. The Dutch construction is further grammaticalized in this respect. These extensions occur more frequently in Dutch, and the French construction also requires more often a preposition to enable the extension. The Dutch minimizing construction can be described as more productive than the French one, and it can be argued that French exhibits less intrinsic inclination toward minimization. Not only does Dutch have more minimizers, but an analysis of a subset of minimizers with a token frequency of 100 shows that Dutch micro-constructions are on average combined with significantly more predicates (type/token ratio) and also with more predicates that occur only once (hapax/token ratio). Conversely, the frequency of the most frequent predicate is significantly higher for the French constructions in the subset. Correlations between productivity measures are visualized through dimensionality reduction, distinguishing two dimensions. The first dimension corresponds to the degree of lexical openness versus conventionalization. The second dimension reveals another aspect of productivity, more prominent in French, namely the potential for innovation within a limited number of types (hapax/type ratio). In addition to lexical openness, semantic openness is also an element of syntactic productivity. It is demonstrated that semantic openness is not always linked to lexical openness, some constructions with a low number of types are still semantically diverse.