How do speakers vary established patterns of language use and adapt them to novel contexts of application? This study presents a usage-based approach to linguistic creativity: combining detailed qualitative with large-scale quantitative analyses of corpus data, it traces the emergence of partial productivity in clusters of conventional collocations.

Focusing on English and German intensification constructions, it proceeds in three steps: having first inventoried the lexical means (of a given semantic type) that are recruited for signalling intensity in both languages,...