“Chaos theory, shmaos theory”: Creativity and routine in English shm-reduplication

This paper investigates an “extravagant” construction at the interface of morphology and syntax: English shm-reduplication, a pattern in which a word is immediately repeated, but the initial consonant or consonant cluster is either replaced by /ʃm/, or /ʃm/ is added to the beginning of a word if it begins with a vowel. So far, research on shm-reduplication has been limited to small samples of the construction and has mainly focused on its phonological and morphosyntactic properties rather than its semantics. The present study aims at filling this gap with a corpus-based analysis of a larger dataset from the web corpus ENCOW16AX. Our findings suggest that shm-reduplication combines elements of routine and creativity: While the pattern is largely unconstrained in its semantics, its unusual syntactic profile and tight connection with specific communicative contexts mark it as an innovative and “extravagant” construction.