Full Title: SLE workshop: Creativity in word-formation: psychological, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic aspects

Date: 21-Aug-2024 - 24-Aug-2024
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Contact Person: Pavel Stekauer
Meeting Email: [email protected]

Linguistic Field(s): Morphology

Call Deadline: 15-Nov-2023

Meeting Description:

The workshop aims to discuss primarily the following questions:
- What is the influence of the general creative potential upon the creative performance manifested in coining new complex words?
- What is the manifestation of the fundamental, psychologically defined properties of word-formation creativity?
- What methods can be used for testing and evaluating creative potential and creative performance in word-formation?
- What is the scope of word-formation creativity?
- What is the relation between word-formation creativity and productivity?
- Sociolinguistic factors affecting word-formation creativity
- Any other relevant issues

Call for Papers:

Creativity has become a field of rapid growth and is of growing interest to linguists, psychologists as well as philosophers, especially because “creativity is not the exclusive preserve of the individual genius, a property of exceptional people, but an exceptional property of all people” (Carter 2015). This assumption reflects the most recent comprehension of creativity as the creative potential of each human being to generate products that are novel (original), appropriate (relevant), effective, based on an intentional activity and that occur in a specific context. The creative potential is manifested in the creative performance at all language levels, including the morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic levels.
There are different views of linguistic creativity. Bergs (2019) suggests that the only genuine type of linguistic creativity is an aberration. Authors working on lexical creativity (e.g. Arndt-Lappe et al. 2018) maintain that creativity refers to the coinages and uses of existing words that serve primarily as attention-seeking devices, means of humour, playfulness, ludicity, puns, or wordplay, Mattiello (2013) emphasizes the extra-grammatical essence of morphological creativity. Eitelmann and Haumann (2022) discuss the "extravagant morphology". Körtvélyessy, Štekauer and Kačmár (2022) maintain that creativity is reflected in the formation of new words that are appropriate signs of a class of objects to be named as a result of deliberate creativity (cognitive activity) of language users; these linguistic signs are useful and effective because they serve the communication purposes of a speech community, and since word-formation creativity manifests the universal, biologically preconditioned feature of human beings any and all speakers of a language can produce a new word. Moreover, if we accept the view that the product of creativity has to be something different, new, or innovative, each new complex word meets these criteria because each such new coinage is different from the existing actual words, that means, from the institutionalized vocabulary of a language and, by definition, it is innovative with regard to the naming needs of a speech community. All in all, each new word results from the creative activity (creative performance) of a speaker of a language.
The workshop therefore aims to discuss primarily the following questions:
- What is the influence of the general creative potential upon the creative performance manifested in coining new complex words?
- What is the manifestation of the fundamental, psychologically defined properties of word-formation creativity?
- What methods can be used for testing and evaluating creative potential and creative performance in word-formation?
- What is the scope of word-formation creativity?
- What is the relation between word-formation creativity and productivity?
- Sociolinguistic factors affecting word-formation creativity
- Any other relevant issues

References:
Arndt-Lappe, S., A. Braun, Claudine Moulin and E. Winter-Froemel, eds. 2018. Expanding the Lexicon: Linguistic Innovation, Morphological Productivity, and Ludicity. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Bergs, A. 2019. “What, If Anything, Is Linguistic Creativity?” Gestalt Theory 41/2: 173-184.
Carter, R. 2015. Language and Creativity. The art of common talk. 2nd ed. London/New York: Routledge.
Eitelmann, M. and D. Haumann (eds.). 2022. Extravagance in morphology. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Körtvélyessy, Lívia, Pavol Štekauer, and Pavol Kačmár. 2022. Creativity in word-formation and word-interpretation. Creative potential and creative performance. Cambridge: CUP.
Mattiello, Elisa. 2013. Extra-grammatical morphology in English. Abbreviations, Blends, Reduplicatives, and Related Phenomena. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.