ABSTRACT
Natural languages are held in a tension between their use as vehicles of communication, which implies consistency between speaker and hearer, and the fact that such use inevitably begets change. A language system is a finite resource of items — affixes, words, categories, constructions, idioms, set phrases (the exact inventory depends on one’s theoretical stance) — out of which speakers can produce, and hearers can interpret, a potential infinity of messages. For this to be possible, there has to be some way in a given sentence or text for the whole to be understood on the basis of its parts. This is the principle of compositionality, which in its simplest form states: “The meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meanings of its constituents and the way they are combined” (Szabó 2012: 64). Countervailing this is the fact that with recurrent use some combinations may get routinised or conventionalised and come to have a value different from what we might expect on the basis of our knowledge of their parts. This process can be seen at work in different ways in the genesis of new grammatical constructions, or grammaticalisation, and in the development of various types of fixed expression, or what Wray (2002) has called ‘formulaic language’.
