ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the creative uses of language that extend beyond the level of the orthographic word. As numerous studies have shown, the manipulation of recurring syntagmatic patterns in a language is often the basis of humour, irony, or creativity in text. It would even appear that, in English-language newspaper texts at least, manipulated forms of quotations, proverbs, and sayings, are more commonly encountered than canonical forms. Lexical substitution is the main mechanism used to adapt a number of other familiar collocations in the German subcorpus of German-English Parallel Corpus of Literary Texts (GEPCOLT). The unusual nature of the collocation can be put down to the hallucinatory world inhabited by one of the narrators in Gerhard Roth's Am Abgrund. Natascha Wodin describes a perfectly normal physical characteristic, that of brown eyes, in a mannered fashion. Wodin uses it with the subject Frau Dreschers Augen to compare Frau Drescher's later scrutinizing of the narrator with her former inspection of eggs the narrator sold as a child.
