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Functionalist and Usage-based Approaches to the Study of Language: In honor of Joan L. Bybee
Edited by K. Aaron Smith and Dawn Nordquist
[Studies in Language Companion Series 192] 2018
► pp. 225–245

look up about

Usage-based processes in lexicalization

| University of New Mexico

This chapter investigates the emergence of a new English phrasal-prepositional verb, look up about, which is found predominantly in online discourse and is largely synonymous with “to google”. It is argued that the verb emerged as the result of a reanalysis of a source syntagm that eroded an internal constituency boundary and resulted in a new lexical item. In order to understand how reanalysis took place in the lexicalization of look up about, usage-based processes such as chunking and holistic and heuristic-based processing are examined, and Bybee’s (2002) Linear Fusion Hypothesis is also invoked to explain how this multi-word expression has entered the lexicon of many users.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1‘Phrasal-Prepositional Verb’ interpretations
    • 2.2Lexicalization
    • 2.3Usage-based processes
      • 2.3.1Chunking
      • 2.3.2Holistic and shallow processing
  • 3.Data collection and method
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1‘Look up about’ as a lexical item
    • 4.2Development of Multi-Word ‘look up about’
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 March 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.192.10nor
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