Linguistic creativity has become one of the most prominent topics in Construction Grammar. Taking up Sampson’s now well-established distinction between F(ixed)-creativity and E(xtending)-creativity, constructionist approaches are concerned with both types of creativity, which can potentially both play a significant role in accounting for what Goldberg has called the puzzle of partial productivity, i.e. the phenomenon that linguistic constructions usually extend within fairly well-defined (albeit not always easily definable) limits. Creativity can also account for phenomena of constructionalization and constructional change. Despite the surge in research, there are still numerous open questions – for instance, how creativity relates to productivity, and what the relationship may be between linguistic creativity on the one hand and „extravagance“ on the other, a concept orignally developed by Haspelmath (based on Rudi Keller’s maxims of language use) to account for the unidirectionality of grammaticalization but recently taken up in diachronic Construction Grammar as a potential explanation for all kinds of linguistic changes. In this talk, I will discuss to what extent so-called snowclones can shed light on some of those open questions. Snowclones are „extravagant“ formulaic patterns with a(n alleged) fixed source, e.g. [the mother of all X] or [X on the verge of a nervous breakdown]. As patterns with a fixed part and one or more open slot(s) that are often characterized by a rich background in popular culture and tied to specific contexts, they are particularly interesting from a constructionist point of view as they give insights into the way constructional productivity interacts with social and cultural contexts, which in turn can give valuable insights regarding the respect roles of E- and F-creativity in the emergence and spread of linguistic patterns across individuals and communities.

Stefan Hartmann ist Professor für Germanistische Sprachwissenschaft an der Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. Im Mittelpunkt seiner Arbeit steht die Dynamik von Sprache in all ihren Facetten – vom frühkindlichen Spracherwerb über Sprachvariation und Sprachwandel bis zu der Frage, wie die menschliche Sprachfähigkeit evolutionär entstanden ist. Seine Forschungsinteressen liegen im Bereich der historischen Linguistik, Korpuslinguistik, kognitiven Linguistik, Konstruktionsgrammatik und beziehen sich dabei u.a. auf morphologische und grammatische Phänomene in den germanischen Sprachen.