Volume 66, Issue 3 - Special Issue: Linguistic Creativity

Creativity is an important evolutionary adaptation that allows humans to think original thoughts, to find solutions to problems that have never been encountered before and, potentially, to fundamentally change the way we live. In this special issue, we explore the cognitive and psychological factors that influence the verbal creativity of speakers.

This paper investigates linguistic creativity from a constructional perspective. Following a distinction between F-creativity (fixed creativity, like productivity) and E-creativity (extending creativity, creativity beyond rules), it discusses several possible origins for innovations in a given language: errors and mistakes, language contact, and the intentional manipulation of linguistic material in the form of snowcloning, coercion, and aberrancy. This paper shows that only one special form of aberrancy might be classified as ‘pure’ E-creativity. Rather than enforcing the dichotomy between E- and F-creativity, all the other sources of linguistic innovations seem to form a cline between these two poles.

The present paper discusses what may be responsible for the creative effect that instances of a family of constructions, the go/get all/full [PROPER NOUN(S)] on Y pattern, appear to have on the hearer. For this purpose, a set of possible properties of creative language use will be discussed and checked against the results of a detailed corpus analysis of the pattern and related structures. Both the speaker’s and the hearer’s perspectives will be taken into account.

This article explores to what extent linguistic creativity can be accounted for by investigating the collocational and collostructional properties of different constructions. A distinction is made between intended creativity and creativity caused by despair. It is argued that while unexpected combinations of constructions (in the sense of lexical items and syntactic constructions) are not the only type of linguistic creativity, they are of particular relevance to linguistic theory because they can only be appropriately accounted for in terms of a model that takes an integrative view of grammar and lexicon and allows for a considerable amount of lexical knowledge concerning the description of constructions.

Speakers may use language creatively because they want to be extravagant, or because they need to communicate content for which no conventional coding solution exists. In addition, however, there is a third motivation for creativity that is both more fundamental and less conspicuous. Speakers are creative because their mental access to linguistic resources is limited and variable – a factor referred to here as ‘availability.’ In this paper, corpus data from the spoken British National Corpus and from the Hansard Corpus are used to show that speakers of English use the morphological pattern of - ly -adverb formation (as in correctly , locally , poorly etc.) more creatively when they have recently heard or used another - ly -adverb. This manifests itself in higher type frequencies – hence, more varied forms – for - ly -adverbs. The effect can be ascribed to priming, and indicates that the creative use of a linguistic resource depends on factors that facilitate mental access to it.

Computational construction grammar aims to provide concrete processing models that operationalise construction grammar accounts of the different aspects of language. This paper discusses the computational mechanisms that allow construction grammar models to exhibit, to a certain extent, the creativity and inventiveness that is observed in human language use. It addresses two main types of language-related creativity. The first type concerns the ‘free combination of constructions,’ which gives rise to the open-endedness of language. The second type concerns the ‘appropriate violation of usual constraints’ that permits language users to go beyond what is possible when adhering to the usual constraints of the language, and be truly creative by relaxing these constraints and by introducing novel constructions. All mechanisms and examples discussed in this paper are fully operationalised and implemented in Fluid Construction Grammar.

Construction Grammar accepts responsibility to account for forms of creativity otherwise almost entirely ignored in linguistics. This commitment is wise, given that creativity is the engine that develops systems of communication. Blending is the main mechanism of this creativity.

This article explores possible connections between language, music and creativity, particularly in terms of change in linguistic and musical grammars. It considers parallels between properties of usage-based grammars (like chunking and schematicity) and musical structures. While some research into the relationship between music and language has tended to align itself more with formal approaches to knowledge about language, the discussion here is more focussed on functional, usage-based approaches. The article sets out some ways in which work on musical change might be used to think about parallels between language and music, and how this connects to creativity.

Any definition of creativity is a ‘machine’ which produces exactly those instances of creativity that follow the rules of the respective definition – so how does one escape the conundrum of defining individual creativity without turning it into a mere act of reproduction? One of the central tenets of the present volume is that Construction Grammar is particularly suited to bridge the gap between everyday linguistic creativity and highly professionalized and conventionalized forms of cultural reproduction, especially creative literature. While it appears to merely follow a trend in cognitive linguistics, which emerged and firmly established itself over the last three decades, and which emphasizes the creative potential of linguistic practices over and against the definition of language and speech as a rule-based system of engendering constraints, Construction Grammar insists on its ability to provide a most profitable interdisciplinary approach for the study of creativity and language – one that would also be able to embrace and empower the study of literary creativity.