Home Blending is creative, but blendedness is not — a response to Mark Turner
Article
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

Blending is creative, but blendedness is not — a response to Mark Turner

  • Thomas Herbst

    Thomas Herbst is Full Professor and Chair of English Linguistics at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg. His research interests are valency theory, collocation studies, cognitive and constructionist theories of language, pedagogical construction grammar, and the linguistic aspects of film dubbing. He is one of the editors of the Valency Dictionary of English (2004) and co-editor of Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik and Lexicographica.

    EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: September 9, 2020
Become an author with De Gruyter Brill

Abstract

This short response to Mark Turner’s article on “Construction and creativity” takes the idea of blending — which is at the centre of Turner’s argument — a step further and shows how it can be applied to syntactic analysis. Furthermore, it distinguishes between blendedness and blending, discussing the relevance of these concepts with respect to their relevance with respect to linguistic creativity.


Corresponding author: Thomas Herbst, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany, E-mail:

Special Issue: Construction Grammar and Creativity edited by Thomas Hoffmann.


About the author

Thomas Herbst

Thomas Herbst is Full Professor and Chair of English Linguistics at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg. His research interests are valency theory, collocation studies, cognitive and constructionist theories of language, pedagogical construction grammar, and the linguistic aspects of film dubbing. He is one of the editors of the Valency Dictionary of English (2004) and co-editor of Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik and Lexicographica.

References

Bergs, Alexander. 2018. Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist (Picasso): Linguistic aberrancy from a constructional perspective. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 66(3). 277–293. https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2018-0025.Search in Google Scholar

Burgschmidt, Ernst & Dieter Götz. 1974. Kontrastive Linguistik. München: Hueber.Search in Google Scholar

Dokulil, Miloš. 1968. Zur Theorie der Wortbildungslehre. Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Karl-Marx-Universität Leipzig, Gesellschafts-und Sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe 17. 203–211.Search in Google Scholar

Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. 1998/2006. Conceptual integration networks. In Dirk Geeraerts (ed.), Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings, 303–371. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.10.1207/s15516709cog2202_1Search in Google Scholar

Goldberg, Adele E. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.Search in Google Scholar

Goldberg, Adele E. 2006. Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199268511.001.0001Search in Google Scholar

Goldberg, Adele E. 2019. Explain Me This: Creativity, Competition, and the Partial Productivity of Constructions. Princeton: Princeton University Press.10.1515/9780691183954Search in Google Scholar

Herbst, Thomas. 2018. Collo-Creativity and blending: Recognizing creativity requires lexical storage in constructional slots. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 66(3). 309–328. https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2018-0027.Search in Google Scholar

Herbst, Thomas. 2010. Valency constructions and clause constructions or how, if at all, valency grammarians might sneeze the foam off the cappuccino. In Hans-Jörg Schmid & Susanne Handl (eds.), Cognitive Foundations of Linguistic Usage Patterns, 225–255. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter Mouton.10.1515/9783110216035.225Search in Google Scholar

Herbst, Thomas & Thomas Hoffmann. 2018. Construction Grammar for students: A constructionist approach to syntactic analysis (CASA). In Beate Hampe & Susanne Flach (eds.), Corpora — Constructions — Cognition: Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association, 197–218. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.10.1515/gcla-2018-0010Search in Google Scholar

Hockett, Charles F. 1958. A Course in Modern Linguistics. New York: Macmillan.10.1111/j.1467-1770.1958.tb00870.xSearch in Google Scholar

Hoffmann, Thomas. 2018. Creativity and Construction Grammar: Cognitive and psychological issues. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 66(3). 259–276. https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2018-0024.Search in Google Scholar

Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 2014. Lexico-grammatical patterns, pragmatic associations and discourse frequency. In Thomas Herbst, Hans-Jörg Schmid & Susen Faulhaber (eds.), Constructions — Collocations — Patterns, 239–293. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.10.1515/9783110356854.239Search in Google Scholar

Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 2020. The Dynamics of the Linguistic System: Usage, Conventionalization, and Entrenchment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oso/9780198814771.001.0001Search in Google Scholar

Sweetser, Eve. 1999. Compositionality and blending: Semantic composition in a cognitively realistic framework. In Theo Janssen & Gisela Redeker (eds.), Cognitive Linguistics: Foundations, Scope, and Methodology, 129–162. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.10.1515/9783110803464.129Search in Google Scholar

Tomasello, Michael. 2003. Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Turner, Mark, 2018. The role of creativity in Multimodal Construction Grammar. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 66(3). 357–370. https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2018-0030.Search in Google Scholar

Turner, Mark. 2020. Constructions and creativity. Cognitive Semiotics 13(1). https://doi.org/10.1515/cogsem-2020-2019.Search in Google Scholar

Uhrig, Peter. 2018. I don’t want to go all Yoko Ono on you: Creativity and variation in a family of constructions. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 66(3). 295–308. https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2018-0026.Search in Google Scholar

Corpus acronyms

OED: Oxford English Dictionary. http://www.oed.com.Search in Google Scholar

BNC: The British National Corpus. Distributed by Oxford University Press Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/.Search in Google Scholar

COCA: Davies, Mark. 2008–2020. The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 611 million words, 1990–present. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/. Accessed January 2020.Search in Google Scholar

COHA: The Corpus of Historical American English.Search in Google Scholar

Published Online: 2020-09-09

© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Downloaded on 25.9.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/cogsem-2020-2020/html
Scroll to top button