The concept of ‘snowclones’ has gained interest in recent research on linguistic creativity and in studies of extravagance and expressiveness in language. However, no clear criteria for identifying snowclones have yet been established, and detailed corpus-based investigations of the phenomenon are still lacking. This paper addresses this research gap in a twofold way. On the one hand, we develop an operational definition of snowclones, arguing that three criteria are decisive: (i) the existence of a lexically fixed source construction; (ii) partial productivity; (iii) ‘extravagant’ formal and/or functional characteristics. On the other hand, we offer an empirical investigation of two patterns that have often been mentioned as examples of snowclones in the previous literature, namely [the mother of all X] and [X BE the new Y]. We use collostructional analysis and distributional semantics to explore the partial productivity of both patterns’ slot fillers. In sum, we argue that the concept of snowclones, if properly defined, can contribute substantially to our understanding of creative language use, especially regarding the question of how social, cultural, and interpersonal factors influence the choice of more or less salient linguistic constructions.

In this paper we demonstrate on the basis of diachronic and synchronic data from a variety of languages that progressives are particularly liable to be used for the expression of extravagance. We define extravagant language use as a signaling mechanism that consists in the exploitation of an unconventional construction in a given context as a way for speakers to indicate that there is something non-canonical about the situation that they are reporting. Novel constructions naturally lend themselves to such extravagant exploitation, since they are by definition to a certain extent unconventional. This is why, as we will demonstrate, the English, Dutch and French progressives were notably often recruited in extravagant contexts at the onset of their development. However, our synchronic data reveal that Present-day English, Dutch and French progressives continue to be used for extravagant purposes, which suggests that there is something inherent about progressive aspect that makes it liable to such expressive usage. This is confirmed by data from other, typologically diverse languages. We offer a cognitive-semantic analysis in terms of epistemic contingency in order to account for this intrinsic association of progressive aspect and extravagance across languages. Our analysis thus reveals that extravagance is not a transient property of emerging progressives, but that, instead, the semantics of these constructions makes them particularly liable to be recruited for extravagant purposes. It also demonstrates that in order to analyze the range of uses of progressive constructions in a unified fashion, we need to look beyond the temporal import of these constructions.