Resonance and recombinant creativity: Why they are important for research in Cognitive Linguistics and Pragmatics

2.1 Resonance and recombinant creativity

A fundamental underpin of the Dialogic Syntax approach is resonance, a mechanism by which interlocutors re-use – and eventually recombine – the form and/or the function of their interactants’ utterances (Du Bois 2014). Resonance allows speakers to construe morphosyntactic, prosodic, semantic and pragmatic analogies (i.a. Fischer 2008; Gentner and Christie 2010) ‘on the fly’ across turns at talk. Instances of resonance are far from being exceptional in dialogic interaction. The naturalistic exchange below is retrieved from the demographically sampled section of the British National Corpus. The conversation is about the East End of London and the possibility of finding bananas in the past in that area.

Structural similarity across turns reflects speakers’ efforts to calibrate their language in order to be best understood and maximize both cognitive and social cooperation. In (1), we can see how speakers eventually align formally and pragmatically with one another via strategies of expected agreement (cf. Tantucci 2017a, 2017b; Tantucci and Di Cristofaro 2020). This is achieved morpho-syntactically via the tag-question construction [X V’nt PRON ?], which in British English is conventionally used to make an assertion along with the expectation of the addressee’s agreement with his/her statement. B is the first to use the construction in the specific form of [Came a long way didn’t they?]. A subsequently resonates with B’s strategy via the utterance [one of these ships docked isn’t it?].

Dialogue unfolds as a joint project among interlocutors (cf. Clark 1996; Branigan et al. 2000; Pickering and Garrod 2021) whereby intersubjective coordination is a key condition for mutual understanding and information flow. In the Conversation Analysis literature, a recurrent notion for the study of adjacency pairs is the one of ‘tying’ (Sacks 1992), involving forms of talk (e.g. indexical, anaphoric reference) which require a hearer to make reference to another utterance to understand the current one, and which thus ‘tie’ the turns at talk to one another. With tying, the focus is on the ‘sequential dependence’ of B’s utterance on A’s one and thus primarily on the unfolding of interlocutors’ engagement as a ‘serial’ process. Similar notions also involve cohesion (Halliday and Hasan 1976), that is the linking that holds a text together and gives it meaning, but also the one of entrainment (Clark 1996), which is at work when adopting the reference terms of an interlocutor. Beyond those, the concept of ‘alignment’ (Pickering and Garrod 2004; Rasenberg et al. 2020) has been perhaps the most cited and influential one in cognitive psychology, hinging on the production and interpretation of expressions in the same ways that a speaker’s partner has just done (Pickering and Garrod 2006). Alignment can result from more or less conscious mechanisms of imitation. As clearly noted in Rasenberg et al. (2020), automatic alignment is at play in cases of priming (e.g., Pickering and Garrod 2004, 2006), whereas less implicit mechanisms of grounding hinge on the interactive and multimodal (Chui 2014) coordinative efforts involved in joint meaning-making and information sharing (Brennan and Clark 1996; Holler and Wilkin 2011; see also cf. Duran et al. 2019 for computational implementations of this).

While it is important to acknowledge a distinction for automatic versus explicit/conscious alignment, the present paper holds a gradient view, whereby complex imitation and recombinant creativity are geared towards engagement, but are not – as a result of that – exclusively centred on sharing information with an interlocutor. In other words, purposeful coordination at talk is not solely epistemic in nature (not solely centered on transmitting information), as imitation may vary in degrees of complexity and self-awareness (cf. Arbib 2012). Interactional engagement may underpin both automatic and purposeful reactions to a previous stimulus. Such reactions may serve different forms of per-locutionary effects (e.g. directing actions, expressing emotions, enhancing rapport and so on), but, plausibly, may often include both automatic and goal-oriented components. This makes it difficult to clearly disentangle alignment that is automatic versus one that is explicit.^[1]

However, one important aspect that has been somewhat neglected in the literature is the relationship between interactional engagement and creativity, that is the degree to which an interlocutor is able – and/or intends – to intervene on what was said by others to formulate something new. In this sense, the focus of resonance is distinctively on the phenomenology of interactional imitation and on whether creativity is at work in response to an utterance. Most importantly, resonance is based on a constructional approach to dialogue, which makes it a quantitatively ‘measurable’ variable (cf. Section 4), with formal and functional analogy as byproducts of both engagement and the ability to produce and categories new constructions.

A large-scale account of resonance thus becomes an important usage-based index of interlocutors’ strategies to cooperate interactionally with one another. Cooperation here does not necessarily mean agreement (or affiliation), as speakers do pursue engagement and interactional coordination also in contexts where they hold different perspectives or beliefs (cf. Tantucci and Wang 2022b). Concerning the relationship between linguistic similarity and relevance, evidence shows that, in contexts that are not constrained by power imbalance and institutional obligations, consistent absence of resonance, and RC in particular, underpins interactional detachment and tends to be significantly at play in subjects with Autism Spectrum Disorder, ASD (cf. Hobson et al. 2012; Du Bois et al. 2014; Rendle-Short et al. 2014; Tantucci and Wang 2022a).

2.2 Recombinant creativity and goal-oriented behaviour

When resonance occurs creatively, cognitive and social cooperation among interlocutors is textually ‘on record’. This is an important cue of interlocutors’ overt ability to coordinate one another’s speech intersubjectively. A transition from mere repetition to creative recombination is observed in child’s ontogeny (Köymen and Kyratzis 2014; Tantucci and Wang 2022b). In early stages of first language acquisition (FLA) children frequently repeat the priming input of their careers or peers. When this happens, resonance occurs ‘statically’, i.e. only on the form of a mere repetition (Tantucci and Wang 2022b), as recombinant creativity is not at play for the cooperative elaboration of new meanings.

In the exchange above, the child (CHI) resonates with what she heard, but does not recombine the priming input of the mother (MOT) in order to express something new. This is a case of static resonance in which the construction [火山 huǒshān ‘volcano’ 爆发 bàofā ‘erupts’] is simply copied.

On the other hand, when structural, semantic and pragmatic features of a dialogic stimulus are creatively recombined, resonance is then dynamic (cf. Du Bois 2014: 353; Tantucci et al. 2018). These are cases where a previously encountered utterance is creatively re-elaborated and new analogies (i.a. Fischer 2008; Gentner and Christie 2010) are realized across turns at talk. A key aspect of dynamic resonance in FLA is that it often serves explicit interactional goals (Corsaro and Maynard 1996; de León 2007; Ervin-Tripp 1991; Goodwin 1990, 2006; Keenan 1977).

Hurley (2008) refers to the notion of ‘true imitation’ in phylogeny as a sophisticated form of proto-social cognition, which requires a novel action learned by observing another do it plus instrumental or means-to-ends structure. In this sense, others personas’ means to achieve their goals are recalibrated, rather than being simply replicated. When behavior is recombined via analogy to achieve new results and per-locutionary effects, complex imitation is at play, which is something that is not found in non-human (e.g. chimps) behaviour (Call and Tomasello 1994; Nagell et al. 1993; Voelkl and Huber 2000). Complex imitation is a spectrum that involves the ability to recognize another’s goal-oriented performance and to use this as the basis for a novel action. This extends to the gradient ability to approximate and categorise variants of actions that are already in the repertoire (cf. Arbib 2012: 163). Complexity of imitation therefore increases with recombinant creativity, as involving the cognitive capacity to recognise, re-enact, modify an observed behaviour and establish new goal-oriented categories of form and meaning as a result. From an ecological perspective, recombinant intervention on structure and the function of a linguistic act – or socio-normative behaviors – is beneficial to expanding the communicative/behavioral potential of that same structure/action. What is novel about this is that speakers’ capacity to categorize linguistic meaning and structure is enacted (Engel et al. 2014) in – either physical or projected – dialogue. Communication and linguistic conceptualization then occur as a ‘meaningful’ re-action to a prior stimulus, rather than an independent ability of categorization.

In FLA, the child shows abilities of recombinant creativity when s/he resonates dynamically with utterances of his/her interlocutors. Consider the British English interaction below from the Fletcher Corpus.

In the exchange in (3), the child does not simply repeat what is said by the investigator (INV), but rather enriches a previous construction that she heard in order to engage with INV’s talk. More specifically, she textually engages with the construct [we have some stickers] in the form of [I have got some stickers at home]. An operational way to analyze this transition – and any other case of resonance – across turns is in the form of a diagraph, i.e. a syntactic structure that emerges from the coupling of two or more utterances (or utterance portions) through the mapping of resonance relations between them (Du Bois and Giora 2014: 354). The corresponding diagraph of example (2) is given in Table 1. The creative alteration of the original ad hoc construction is marked as underlined text (in case of replacement) and in brackets (in case of (addition)).

Diagraphs are important for a corpus-based annotation of dynamic resonance. That is because they allow an annotator to capture the degree of schematicity (i.e. the ability to identify categories of form and meaning) that is jointly construed by the interlocutors (Gentner 1983, Goldberg 2019; Markman and Gentner 2001; Tomasello 2003). Creativity here is key, as the recombinant modification of a previous input allows for the identification of a higher node of schematicity in the speakers’ constructicon (cf. Fillmore et al. 1988).

This principle is relatively simple: analogy across similar constructs triggers categorisation, as some common feature is identified among two single instantiations of form and meaning. In the case of (2), INV’s original construct is re-elaborated and expanded by CHI in a way that we can be replaced by a similar personal pronoun functioning as the subject I. The predicate have can be replaced by have got and the object stickers can be expanded with an external location for the possession of the object. This recombinant process creates affordances for the joint categorisation of the more schematic form [Subj HAVE some stickers] as a higher node of abstraction in the constructional network of both speakers. Importantly, this involves specific goal-oriented behaviour, that is the child’s speech act of informing the interviewer of what he considers a relevant piece of information about those stickers. In fact, what in my view has not been emphasised enough about this process is that it does not necessarily occur with the child’s goal of ‘learning’ new constructions, but rather as a byproduct of interactional engagement with locally specific goals and per-locutionary effects. Differently put, linguistic categorisation occurs via goal-oriented alignment, not just as a process of learning-oriented sedimentation. One speaker identifies schematic patterns of form and meaning through a ‘conceptual pact’ (Brône and Zima 2014) with his/her interlocutor so that the categorisation of new constructions is ‘interactionally plausible’. Such enacted process of conceptualisation is effectively a form of dialogic categorisation (cf. Section 4).

Schematicity in Construction Grammar is normally addressed as a usage-based process of conceptual and syntactic abstraction. The construction [I am tired] is less schematic than [I am ADJ], which is less schematic than [I BE ADJ], which, in turn, is less schematic than [I V ADJ], which is less schematic than [Subj V ADJ], which is less schematic than [SUBJ PREDICATE] and so on. The phonetic realization of I am tired may correspond to all of these representations. What is distinctively novel of the present framework is that increasing schematicity is intertwined with recombinant creativity in dialogic interaction, i.e. we must rely on creative variation to categorise things. Namely, the process of schematisation from specific instantiations ([I am tired]) to more schematic constructions ([Subj V ADJ]) inherently necessitates of a recombinant component that is bound to interactional alignment with some other interlocutor(s).

2.3 Recombinant is not transformational

In Construction grammar, creativity is often seen as a capacity that competes with repetition and conventionalization (e.g. Diessel 2006; Goldberg 2019; Tantucci and Di Cristofaro 2019).

One reason for the considerable emphasis of the usage-based model on the idiosyncratic and repetitive component of constructions might be the strong stance against the Chomskian assumption of syntax as a transformational component of language (i.a. Chomsky 2013). While both traditional and dialogic usage-based models do emphasise the key role of innovation (i.a. Croft 2007, 2010; Traugott and Trousdale 2013) and ‘extravagance’ (Haspelmath 1999) for constructional change, nonetheless very little emphasis has been given – both theoretically and methodologically – to the role of pro-active recombination of form and meaning throughout interaction as an inherent component of the theory. This is possibly due to the need for the usage-based model to avoid confusion with notions echoing a ‘transformational’ terminology. The latter concept is traditionally associated with the assumption that syntax depends on innate and modular ability to generate and transform structure independently from meaning. However, corpus data extensively suggest that language structure and meaning are constantly re-adapted and re-structured through interaction: in this sense, grammar might be not generative or transformational, but it is indeed recombinant. My claim is that a usage-based view of interactional abilities is inherently dependent on humans’ capacity to recombine form and meaning of similar constructions and behaviours through (or after) dialogic engagement. In fact, from a strictly usage-based perspective, the bottom-up process of acquisition of a constructicon (e.g. Fillmore et al. 2003) is not possible without analogy and recombinant adaptation of constructions via the here-and-now of dialogic categorisation. Language is built out of constantly recycled constructions (Christiansen and Chater 2022) that derive from manipulation of other people’s utterances (Kecskes 2017). It is therefore critical for the usage-based model to give a new emphasis to flexible and recombinant components of human interaction.

3.1 Recombinant creativity and relevance checking

Consider now a demographically sampled exchange from the BNC in (5) below.

The dialogue occurs in a context that is expected to be interactive, as it is a real-time discussion about arranging a number of connection lines for a particular event. This excludes lower expectations of knowledge exchange typical of storytelling for instance (Drummond and Hopper 1993; Sacks 1974: 337; Stivers 2008).

In (5), A is pro-actively making sure that the ‘plan’ will be implemented. At some point A directs B’s attention to the ongoing interaction itself via the metalinguistic construction [Are you with me?], so as to make sure that B is properly engaged with what is being said. The idiom is used to realise a specific form of directive speech act, which can be defined as a ‘relevance checking’ strategy. Idiomatic constructions of this kind are conventionally used to monitor the addressee’s involvement in the interaction, and, whether what is said is relevant to him/her. The directive illocutionary force is due to the addressee being expected to pay more attention to the ongoing interaction and produce a more substantial contribution to the dialogue: there is a negative mismatch in epistemic reciprocity (Culpeper & Tantucci 2021; Tantucci et al. 2022). What is key in (5) is that B’s engagement with A on record is very poor, as all she provides are mere backchannels, yet without any propositional information being reciprocated in return. In other words, B does nothing more than acknowledging that information is being transmitted from A to herself, with no diagraphs emerging from the exchange: resonance is absent.

Higher degree of engagement is at play when some propositional content is dialogically returned from B to A. This is shown to correlate, on a large scale, with resonance (e.g. Tantucci and Wang 2021). Consider example (6) below which takes place in a Cinema Board meeting.

In example (6), B pro-actively engages with the language that is produced by A. In particular, structural and lexical analogies are realised in the transition from B’s turn to of A’s turn. This recombinant strategy is markedly different from mere backchanneling, as it underpins pro-active exchange of information flow (cf. Tantucci et al. 2022) on the one hand, and is characterised by overt relevance acknowledgement (RA), on the other. Different from example (5), this is a scenario where A is unlikely to verify whether B is engaged with his speech (e.g. via relevance checking strategies such as [Are you with me]). An obvious speculation here is that having large scale speech acts of ‘relevance checking’ is more likely when recombinant creativity is absent rather than when is present. Similarly, all conditions being equal, instances of dynamic resonance among interlocutors normally lead to longer turns at talk (including higher number of words) than when recombinant creativity is absent (cf. Tantucci and Wang 2021, 2022a, 2022b, 2022c; Tantucci et al. 2022).

3.2 Recombinant creativity and autistic speech

Recombinant capacities in dialogue serve information flow among interlocutors. When this happens, relevance acknowledgement is textually ‘on record’ as speaker B relies on elements of A’s talk in order to continue the interaction. This dual capacity has been shown to be partly impeded in ASD (Du Bois et al. 2014; Hobson et al. 2012; Tantucci and Wang 2022a, 2022b). In autistic speech, the process of learning is mostly based on acquisition and storage of information, with engagement resulting in the desire to share all that has been acquired. What is often comparatively weaker in ASD speech is the element of relevance acknowledgement and recombinant innovation in ‘real time’, that is during the here-and-now of the interaction (cf. Tantucci and Wang 2022a). This suggests that communication in subjects with ASD is not impeded for what concerns the long-term categorization of form and meaning and the functional ability to speak grammatically and idiomatically (cf. Anderson et al. 2007; Wodka et al. 2013; Kim et al. 2014; Kissine 2021). Rather, what seems to be relatively inhibited is the ability to flexibly recombine dialogic structure and meaning at the moment of the interaction. The excerpt (7) below is from a context of toy play with 5 year old Roger from the Flusberg corpus of ASD child’s speech.

The excerpt briefly illustrates a tendency in autistic children’s speech where dynamic resonance statistically appears to be less flexible in contrast with neurotypical individuals (Hobson et al. 2012; Tantucci and Wang 2022b). This also reflects a socially more impeded ability to engage in dialogic behaviour as it would be expected in socio-culturally situated interaction. In the exchange above, Roger does not proactively engage with and respond to Helen’s speech. The only turn in which Roger formally resonates with his mother, is in the static form of a greeting at parting with another person, Alice, as in Bye Alice.

3.3 Recombinant creativity and intercultural communication

Recombinant creativity is essential in intra-cultural interaction, but also a fundamental mechanism serving inter-cultural communication and SLA. This is not simply because second language speakers create affordances for categorization based on what they hear from their native interlocutors, but also because re-using one another’s constructions at talk is a key strategy for intercultural engagement. Consider the exchange below from the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE), which is set in the context of examination involving an English language instructor and a Chinese student of English.

In this example, the student resonates with the compound group discussion, however, he does so in a recombinant way that leads to a non-idiomatic lexeme, namely group talking. This analogy creates affordances for the dialogic categorisation of the more schematic [group Speech Activity] construction. At this point, the instructor further resonates with what the student said by re-using the original compound group discussion, as to implicitly suggest that this would be a preferable lexical choice. She further self-expands on the same lexeme by resonating with the student’s less acceptable form group talking.

In the excerpt, resonance both underpins intercultural engagement and constructional categorisation. On the one hand, the native speaker overtly shows a pedagogical preference towards the idiomatic option, so that the student will gather that the more prototypical member of the [group Speech Activity] construction is group discussion. At the same time, s/he also resonates with what the student has said – despite it being unidiomatic – so as to display overt engagement with his/her turn at talk and lexical choices. This is ultimately to show that RC functions as a fundamental mechanism for the establishment of a dynamic common ground (Kecskes 2014) that is most distinctive of intercultural communication, as a ‘dialogic pact’ about the ad hoc acceptability of the lexical compound group talking is established between the speakers during that specific exchange. The two interlocutors, therefore, establish a mutual understanding that group talking is provisionally acceptable ‘between them’, but that it would be best to use group discussion in future contexts of interaction with other native speakers of English (cf. Tantucci 2021 on immediate vs extended intersubjectivity). What this means is that when common ground is co-created – as this is generally the case in contexts of intercultural communication – strategies of resonance and recombinant creativity may involve ad hoc functions not to be found in typical intra-cultural exchanges. A case in point is the coexistence of static and dynamic resonance within same turns, conveying two completely different forms of engagement: in (8) the examiner alternated the two compounds group discussion and group talking within the same utterance.

4.1 The applicability of the DCM to Pragmatics research

The DCM works at its best as a multifactorial scheme of annotation, which is necessary in Pragmatics research. This is because the degree of resonance may be predicted by a diverse range of variables, including distance from the priming construction and the resonating one, multimodal components (e.g. gaze, gestures), power relations, social distance, speakers’ identities, demographics and cultural background, but also illocutionary forces. An example of the latter is in (9) below.

In (9) A employs a conventionalized construction to perform a greeting at parting in British English [I’ll see you later] which is similar to saying goodbye. The expression is low in compositionality (Traugott and Trousdale 2013), as the semantic contribution of each word to the procedural meaning of the construction is rather opaque. In fact, A performs the action of ‘greeting at parting’ rather than making a factual assertion about meeting B at some point during the day. In the following turn, B resonates with A’s proposition I’ll see you later, with the addition of the sentence-peripheral pragmatic marker anyway. In this case, B creatively recombines the meaning of the internal constituents of A’s utterance as s/he makes a new assertion (which includes a commissive component) to emphasize that they will effectively meet each other later on. This is exemplified in the diagraph in Table 3.

With creative alteration of the original construct, engagement with the other speaker is textually ‘on record’. At the same time, new affordances are possible for shared categorization of pairings of form and meaning. After B’s utterance leads to a joint understanding that the construct [I’ll see you later ADV] is structurally similar to [I’ll see you later], but pragmatically involves a completely different kind of behavior: from A’s greeting to B’s commitment to meet again the same day.

Figure 2 illustrates a large scale, cross-cultural quantification of 2,000 assertive speech acts involving dynamic resonance in Chinese versus American English interaction among family members, from the Callhome corpora of telephone conversation. Each black dot represents one resonating exchange. The diamond-shaped symbols in the middle of the violin plots indicate that means of syntactic, lexical resonance and distance, respectively. In this case, a clear cross-cultural mismatch emerges in favour of Mandarin speakers involving resonance occurring morphosyntactically, lexically and the distance between the original dialogic stimulus and the resonating construction.

Figure 2:

A cross-cultural comparison of resonance occurring assertive speech acts. Schematic abstraction of [HAVE IND NP TIME-ADV] (Tantucci and Wang 2022a: 132).

One of the challenges in Pragmatics research has traditionally been the development of frameworks that could capture conversational and cooperative maxims and heuristics on a large scale. This issue is complicated by fact that Pragmatics primarily account for extra-propositional meaning that is often conventionally or conversationally implied. As a result, the discipline has traditionally been geared towards individual examples that could illustrate how meaning and socio-normative evaluations emerge from particular concurrences of context and utterances. In the last few years a new quantitative turn has been emerging in Pragmatics research (Culpeper and Gillings 2019), with the aim of providing tools to measure implied meaning in context on a large scale. The DCM is in line with this trend in that it has the capacity to quantitatively account for dynamic resonance and inform the degree to which interlocutors overtly engage with one another’s language through dialogue. Most importantly, it provides the methods to enquire whether such engagement is creative and therefore pro-actively geared towards the continuation of information flow and contribute to reciprocity. At the same time, it also provides the tools to assess the degree of schematic abstraction (i.e. the establishment of new constructions) and creativity that is achieved from one turn to another in conversation, shedding new light on naturalistic speech in FLA, ASD, Intercultural Communication, Social Media, Political debate and other dialogic contexts of language use to name a few.

5.1 Recombinant creativity and social schemas

Intuitively, recombinant creativity is not only at work for linguistic constructions, that is it is not always at play in the form of resonance. RC is also a fundamental component for the categorization and the acquisition of socio-normative behavior. This is because people do not just talk to one another, but are rather – more or less consciously – aware of the type of activity they are jointly engaged in (Tomasello 2008: 72; Tantucci 2020) and jointly construct such activity type (Levinson 1979; Stokoe 2012), including the social roles that fit them (Berger and Luckman 1966: 89–96; cf. also the notion of conceptual frames in Cognitive Semantics e.g. Fillmore and Atkins 1992). In this respect, Sacks crucially notes that a culture is “an apparatus for generating recognizable actions” (1992), whereby repetition and analogies across situated behaviours play central roles in constructing and recognizing social norms.

Imagine a child who somehow happens to watch a boxing match on the television. S/he notices that at the end of the last inning the two contestants hug each other as a sign of fair play throughout the ‘fight’. The child may engage in complex imitation and adapt that behavior at the kindergarten with one of his/her peers with the expectation that this will further improve their social relationship. For instance, she may recombine the punching component of the boxing ‘game’ into a judo class with his/her mates. Pretty soon s/he will learn that punching is bound to very specific activity types in order to be socially acceptable. S/he will eventually also learn that even in the context of a boxing competition, ‘punching’ is not necessarily conducive to the improvement of interpersonal relationships. This kind of recombinant mechanism will be at play in a variety of contexts via ‘real’ implementation, but also simulation (e.g. Hurley 2008). The same process will involve the acquisition and the categorization of the highly situated nature of various speech acts, such as ordering, requesting, asking and so forth. Just as for verbal or nominal slots of a schematic construction (e.g. the animate nature of Obj1 as part of the ditransitive construction [GIVE Obj1 an/the Obj2]), s/he will constantly recombine and re-use different kinds of linguistic and behavioural strategies in different social settings, which in some cases will prove socially unacceptable, in some others will be well received.

The recombinant component of socio-normative categorization will also be key for the understating that certain actions are ‘universally’ (i.e. semantically) wrong, such is killing or stealing, meaning that negative evaluations of such actions are at play in almost every possible context and therefore can reach a very high degree of schematic categorization, as in the social schema [KILL ➝ UNACCEPTABLE], whereby the ‘➝’ operator symbolically stands for socially evaluated as. Others will be understood to involve a lower degree of schematicity and therefore need to be situated contextually to be judged as socially acceptable or even commendable. An example of this would be the categorisation of the minimal context (cf. Terkourafi 2001, 2009) or conceptual frame (Fillmore 1976, 2006) of boxing activity and the socio-normative schema [PUNCH in the context of boxing ➝ ACCEPTABLE].

Just like morphosyntactic constructions, social contexts and activity types are conceptually stored due to their varying token and type frequency. A highly frequent situation type that the child conceptualizes, which also involves high token frequency, may be having breakfast at the kitchen table with his/her mother before going to school, or displaying the bus ticket to the school bus driver. These will be characterized by relatively conventionalized interactional formulas, e.g. good morning, how did you sleep? Thank you and so on. These will soon be conceptualised as involving a gradient range of possible interactional strategies and constructions. Throughout this whole process of schematic categorization of socio-normative behavior, recombinant creativity will be a fundamental component of the enactment of pragmatic competence and intersubjective awareness, as once again, categorisation will occur as a result of creativity through complex imitation and ways expressions can be recombined, e.g. [Did you sleep well?], [Did you have a good night sleep?], and so on.

5.2 Recombinant creativity and (im)politeness

An important argument of this paper is that recombinant creativity is a key component of intra- and inter-cultural adaptation and understanding. (Im)politeness is a domain where RC is most prominent, as it requires the socio-normative understanding of what might cause offence to someone (cf. Culpeper 2011) in different contexts. In her frame-based politeness approach, Terkourafi (2005: 213) argues that expressions and behaviours become conventionalized when there is a “relationship holding between utterances and contexts, which is a correlate of the (statistical) frequency with which an expression is used in one’s experience of a particular context”. These count as polite as they become normative and go unchallenged (e.g. Haugh 2007; Terkourafi 2005) and become part of expected behavior in some situation. The categorization of normative behavior in context, in turn, requires a speaker’s ability to engage in complex imitation and the capacity to recombine some components of situated interaction. This means that the categorization of ‘normatively polite’ behavior results from the proactive enactment and assessment of the components that are considered acceptable by a community of practice in some situation. Politeness (in the sense of politic engagement, cf. Watts 2003; Culpeper and Tantucci 2021) is therefore construed via an enactive process of recombinant implementation of possible ‘behavioural slots’ that are experienced to be normatively acceptable in some activity type or minimal context. Even throughout a process of inter-cultural adjustment and second language acquisition, speakers’ ability to engage in recombinant creativity is plausibly a fundamental element of the categorisation of polite behavior in context.