Abstract This paper analyzes symmetric NPN constructions (e.g., day to day, face face, step by ) qualitatively and quantitatively examining data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, Mark. 2008–. The (COCA): 570 million words, 1990–present. http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ ). constructions’ frequency productivity, as well their semantics extension potential (i.e., modification, c...