Common language: corpus, creativity and cognition

Abstract

This article takes further debates concerning the nature of literary language and the presence of literariness in a range of discourses by exploring the extent to which everyday conversational discourse displays literary properties. The article argues that the inherent creativity of so-called 'ordinary', 'everyday' language has been overlooked by researchers, who have tended to focus on literary texts or on more obviously creative discourse such as advertising language. The data explored in this article are drawn from the CANCODE project which is one of the most extensive collections of informal spoken English currently available. The main argument developed is that both social and psychological models are needed to explain the phenomena of 'pattern-developing' and 'pattern-forming' which are described in the collected data. 1

Reason and Creativity in Classroom Dialogues

“…Derrida argues that creativity in language does not need to be explained (Derrida, 1967), it is the absence of creativity that needs to be explained. This position is supported by the empirical findings of corpus linguistics (Carter, 1999(Carter, , 2004. On the other hand this uncaused creativity appears in a context.…”

“…In this they are not exceptional. Ron Carter (1999) argues that this creative 'poetic' use of language is so common in everyday talk amongst equals that it should be considered the norm. This has only become apparent recently because it has only recently been possible to collect large amounts of data of ordinary spoken language.…”

Literature in Language Education

“…Indeed a provocative formulation of the research reviewed in this chapter could be the surprising degree of literariness of the ordinary, and the equally pervasive ordinariness of the literary, particularly in the modern period. (Compare conclusions of Mukarǒvský 1964;Carter 1999). Most crucially for the language teacher, it could be that the language of literature is noticeably different in that it is typically more interesting and varied and ultimately indeed more representative than the language of dreamed-up dialogues in chemists' shops or reprinted AIDS leaflets, as found in many of the best intentioned classrooms today.…”

“…The importance of the work of Carter (1999Carter ( , 2004, Carter and McCarthy (1995 and others in this area, as in the 'CANCODE' project, is to demonstrate as well how rich in linguistic creativity ordinary language use is too. The way in which these apparently contradictory findings can be reconciled is to see linguistic creativity, in life as in literary writing, as a constrained activity, very real, but operating within constraints.…”

Lexicography and Linguistic Creativity

“…Creative uses of language have, of course, long been discussed within linguistics: for example, in the contexts of humour (Nash 1985, Chiaro 1992, word coinage (Bauer 1983, Katamba 1994, and spoken interaction (Carter 1999, McCarthy 1998 So the main theme of the book is that creativity is an all-pervasive feature of everyday language. And, as I shall say more than once, linguistic creativity is not simply a property of exceptional people, but an exceptional property of all people.…”