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Article published In: Today’s Innovations, Tomorrow’s Conventions: Usage-based approaches to incipient developments in English
Edited by David Lorenz and David Tizón-Couto
[Functions of Language 32:1] 2025
► pp. 43–73

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I’m all virtual-peopled out

Creativity and productivity in the case of the English ‘exhaustive’ construction

 | University of Zurich
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with University of Zurich.

Published online: 12 May 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.23015.zeh
Abstract
This paper assesses the recent development of a particular constructional template, viz. the ‘exhaustive’ construction in English. This pattern combines a form of [all X-(e)d out] with a meaning of ‘being exhausted from excessive experiences with X’, where the X-slot is proposedly almost unlimited in its productivity, as any lexical item and word class can be coerced into it. The paper uses data from the NOW-corpus, covering the time-span of 2010-2022 (Davies, Mark. 2016–. Corpus of News on the Web (NOW). [URL]), to (a) zoom in on the origins of this constructional idiom, (b) investigate its recent history as an instance of on-going change, both in terms of token frequency and of type frequency/productivity, and (c) assess the interaction of creativity, coercion, productivity, and schematicity in this development. The results indicate that the ‘exhaustive’ likely constitutes an extension of expressions of tiredness (as in all worn out), but counter to expectations, seems to have been decreasing in productivity in recent years. This may be linked to its persisting status as a creative, deliberate ad-hoc deviation from conventions rather than a conventionalising innovation.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous research
    • 2.1‘Exhaustives’ and related constructions
    • 2.2Productivity, schematicity, coercion, and creativity
  • 3.Data and methods
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Relations between the ‘exhaustive’ and other constructions
    • 4.2Recent development of the ‘exhaustive’ and the other constructions
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Coercion and creativity in the case of ‘exhaustives’
    • 5.2Against conventionalisation: ‘exhaustives’ as a case of decreasing productivity
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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