Quantifying Constructional Productivity with Unseen Slot Members

This paper is concerned with the possibility of quantifying and comparing the productivity of similar yet distinct syntactic constructions, predicting the likelihood of encountering unseen lexemes in their unfilled slots. Two examples are explored: variants of comparative correlative constructions (CCs, e.g. the faster the better), which are potentially very productive but in practice lexically restricted; and ambiguously attached prepositional phrases with the preposition with, which can host both large and restricted inventories of arguments under different conditions. It will be shown that different slots in different constructions are not equally likely to be occupied productively by unseen lexemes, and suggested that in some cases this can help disambiguate the underlying syntactic and semantic structure.