Abstract Languages are complex systems that allow speakers to produce novel grammatical utterances. Yet, linguists differ as to how general and abstract they think the mental representation of speakers have to be to give rise to this grammatical creativity. In order to shed light on these questions, the present study looks at one specific construction type, English comparative correlatives, that turns out to be particularly interesting in this context: on the one hand it has been described in terms of one of the most abstract and general syntactic rules, on the other hand it shows specific idiomatic structures that are often produced without any variation (e.g. the more, the merrier). While the syntax and semantics of the English Comparative Correlative (CC) construction have received considerable attention in the literature, so far only a small number of usage-based analyses have been published on the topic. These either only relied on small databases or focussed only on the productivity of one slot in the construction. In contrast to this, the present study analyses more than 1,400 CC tokens sampled from COCA. The results of the present study yield important results concerning English CC constructions, including the schematicity and generality of their mental representations.

中文翻译：

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数据越多越好：英语比较相关构造的基于用法的说明

摘要语言是允许说话者产生新颖的语法语调的复杂系统。然而，语言学家在他们认为说话者的心理表现形式必须产生多大的语法创造力方面有不同的看法。为了阐明这些问题，本研究着眼于一种特定的构造类型，即英语比较相关性，在这种情况下，它特别有趣：一方面，它是用最抽象的一种描述的。和一般的句法规则，另一方面，它显示了特定的惯用语结构，这些惯用语结构通常没有任何变化（例如，越多越好）。尽管英语比较相关（CC）构造的语法和语义在文献中受到了相当大的关注，到目前为止，关于该主题仅发布了少量基于使用情况的分析。这些要么仅依赖小型数据库，要么仅专注于结构中一个插槽的生产率。与此相反，本研究分析了从COCA采样的1,400多个CC令牌。本研究的结果产生了有关英语CC结构的重要结果，包括其心理表征的图解和一般性。