Cooptation is a cognitive-communicative operation whereby a piece of text, such as a clause, a phrase, a word, or any other unit, is inserted in a sentence.
[1][2] The operation of cooptation can be illustrated with the following utterance taken from the British component of the International Corpus of English:.
[3] In this example, the utterance is obviously composed of two pieces: On the one hand, there is the well-formed and self-contained sentence What I’ve done here is try and limit the time taken on this item by putting it in writing, which provides the host construction.
On the other hand, there is the piece I hope you don’t entirely disapprove, which is inserted in the host construction but neither syntactically nor semantically, nor prosodically integrated in the host construction, and rather than contributing to the meaning of the sentence, it relates to the situation of discourse.
[8] Cooptation is fully productive, that is, it can be employed by speakers any time to structure speech.