Constructional contaminations in phraseology: a Construction Grammar perspective

Abstract Phraseological contaminations are usually treated as slips, errors, or occasional deviations from established phraseological patterns. From a constructionist perspective, however, they may offer valuable insights into the way phraseological knowledge is organised and accessed by speakers. Focusing on intralinguistic data from Italian, Spanish, and German web corpora, this paper examines phraseological contaminations as the result of interactions between cognitively related constructions. Combining corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches, we propose a typology of phraseological contaminations based on formal and semantic criteria. These criteria also consider constructional idioms and phenomena such as coercion and lexical blending. In this way, our study fills an important gap in research on contaminations within a Construction Grammar framework. The paper focuses specifically on the role of horizontal relations within the Constructicon, on the continuum linking occasional and recurrent contaminations, and on the processes of conventionalization. The analysis shows that contaminations are not random anomalies but recurrent traces of the associative links that connect phraseological constructions. The findings suggest that contaminations can be used to identify cognitive and constructional links between phraseological units that are not always visible in conventional descriptions. Finally, the study shows that many so-called errors or slips can be interpreted as unintentional contaminations, whereas recurrent and partially conventionalized hybrids represent creative contaminations, even though both types can be situated along a continuum in line with the tenets of Construction Grammar.