fixedness

Jean Hudson jhudson at CUP.CAM.AC.UK
Mon Jul 21 10:45:10 UTC 1997


Thankyou for responses on fixedness, and some further clarification.

I am familiar with the Firthian concepts and also much of what has been
written about idioms (esp more recent psycholinguistic work demonstrating
the relationship between reduced salience via certain types of metaphor, and
fixedness (ie, syntactic, semantic, collocational constraints).

My question concerned only the situation where there seems to be incipient
grammaticalization of a 'full lexical item' and a concomitant propensity for
that item to enter into fixed expressions (together with all the other
symptoms of gramm:n - decategoriality etc). I don't think there is a great
deal of interest in this particular question, and don't want to take too
much space on this discussion list, but if anyone out there is interested in
further discussion of this very specific aspect of fixedness, please get in
touch.

Jean Hudson



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