The Xed out construction: between productivity and creativity

Abstract

The Xed out  construction, as in I’m all coffeed out , is said to be completely productive. This paper argues that unrestrained productivity is more the exception than the rule. A corpus-based study (blogs and forums) makes it  possible to detect morphosyntactic preferences and also what lies beyond the more stable areas of the construction, when the language user chooses to exploit it in a more creative way. In all cases, it turns out that productivity is  determined by general or more local principles, and that sets of linguistic and extra-linguistic constraints tend to compete or conflict with each other.