Contrastive is the new black: A cross-linguistic study of a “snowclone” in English, German, and Spanish

Abstract

Recent constructionist research has seen increased interest in language contact and contact-induced change. In this paper, we present a contrastive corpus-based analysis of the “snowclone” [X BE the new Y] and its equivalents in German and Spanish. Our results show that the construction is most frequent in English but productive in all three languages. Collostructional analysis techniques reveal parallels among the lexemes that the pattern combines with in each language, but also differences in the degree of semantic variability. Together, the results reflect the role of constructional borrowing in the emergence of the German and Spanish constructions, which can be modelled via links in the mental network of multilingual speakers.