I’m all virtual-peopled out: Creativity and productivity in the case of the English ‘exhaustive’ construction

This paper assesses the recent development of a particular constructional template, viz. the ‘exhaustive’ construction in English. This pattern combines a form of [all X-(e)d out] with a meaning of ‘being exhausted from excessive experiences with X’, where the X-slot is proposedly almost unlimited in its productivity, as any lexical item and word class can be coerced into it. The paper uses data from the NOW-corpus, covering the time-span of 2010-2022 (Davies 2016–), to (a) zoom in on the origins of this constructional idiom, (b) investigate its recent history as an instance of on-going change, both in terms of token frequency and of type frequency/productivity, and (c) assess the interaction of creativity, coercion, productivity, and schematicity in this development. The results indicate that the ‘exhaustive’ likely constitutes an extension of expressions of tiredness (as in all worn out), but counter to expectations, seems to have been decreasing in productivity in recent years. This may be linked to its persisting status as a creative, deliberate ad-hoc deviation from conventions rather than a conventionalising innovation.