Most borrowable construction ever! A large-scale approach to contact-induced pragmatic change

Abstract

The construction Beste boek ooit (‘Best book ever!’) comes in different forms in Dutch. Variation is not only attested in the absence or presence of determiners and postmodifiers, but also in code choice: English, Dutch and hybrid (Beste boek ever!) variants occur.This article investigates differentiation between instances with ooit and instances with ever. To ensure sufficient signal, we adopt a bird's eye perspective, analyzing over 100,000 observations from a Twitter corpus from the Low Countries (period 2011–2016). Our results reveal that (1) the two constructional variants increase in frequency in the time period under study, (2) this increase is more pronounced for the ooit-variant; (3) the ever-variant undergoes specialization towards a pragmatically marked form.Overall, our account complements anglicism research (Andersen 2014) in four ways. First, we foreground constructional borrowing instead of single-word borrowing. Second, in working with Twitter data, we break with the tradition of print media corpora. Third, we explore NLP based methods for large datasets sampled from big data collections in a field of research that has mainly relied on manual coding of small-scale datasets. Finally, we illustrate how matter and pattern replication can go hand in hand in contact-induced change.