Cognitive entrenchment, idiomaticity and corpora : from theoretical issues to practical examples

Colson, Jean-Pierre [UCL]

The notion of cognitive entrenchment was introduced in cognitive grammar (Langacker) and has been taken over by construction grammar. As entrenchment (at an individual level) goes together with conventionality (in a language community), it comes as no surprise that language corpora should keep a trace of very entrenched constructions. Collostructional analysis, for all its limitations, has already shed some light on the relationship between entrenchment and statistical association. In this paper, a similar but broader view is taken on the interaction between entrenchment / conventionality, two notions that are closely related to the phraseological notion of fixedness, and statistical recurrence in large linguistic corpora. A special point of interest is idiomaticity, because figurative language in general turns out to be deeply entrenched, probably because of its unexpected semantic structure. While all idiomatic phrases are entrenched (as measured by high statistical association scores), it works only in one direction: a very high association score, on the other hand, does not necessarily imply idiomaticity, which also sheds some light on a fascinating aspect of cognitive semantics.