Читать книгу Collocations, Creativity and Constructions - Cordula Glass - Страница 16

What makes a theory that allows constructions to exist a “construction-based theory” is the idea that the network of constructions captures our grammatical knowledge of language in toto, i.e. it’s constructions all the way down.

(Goldberg 2006: 18)

The last chapter has shown that creativity is a basic faculty of human cognition (> 3.2). At the same time, creative alternations of language seem to be part of every aspect of language, not just poetic works of art, but also everyday conversation (Carter 2004, Crystal 1998). Creativity is at work in any aspect of language, and even established sequences like collocations show not only a certain degree of flexibility but creative alternations as well. As with most creative innovation, new items gradually become familiar. In the fields of lexicology and grammatical structures, this is already quite an established phenomenon. A word like gay, for example, simply meant very generally being ‘happy and full of fun’ (OALD 7: gay). However, its creative, extended use to refer to ‘homosexual’ soon became so established that it could now be regarded as its only reading. Not just single words but lexical sequences or phrases too can acquire a new or additional function, like the frequently quoted going to, which used to refer to a literal change of place, yet, through creative extension, came to acquire the additional function of expressing ‘future’ (Bybee/Pagliuca 1987). Examples of creative variants or sequences which have found their way into conventional language use can be found in every aspect of language.

As in many other areas, creativity is one of the building blocks of change, which again represents one of the fundamental aspects of development and progress. Therefore, understanding collocations and their new creative alternations also contributes to any theory which seeks to provide a comprehensive framework of language. In order to do so, it is necessary to understand what linguistic change is and, even more importantly, how it is created. In linguistic research generally, two ways exist to investigate change: either through diachronic analysis of co-occurrences over time or through studies within a cognitive system like the human mind. There are several reasons why this study will focus on change from a cognitive point of view, analysing factors of change and creativity within the human mind within an individual’s lifecycle: First, the process of language acquisition, even if seen as a life-long enterprise, is confined to a relatively short time span. If creativity and change can be observed within the relatively short span of a lifetime, the results could be taken as a starting point to investigate whether this phenomenon prevails and develops or if it remains a short-lived whim. A second aspect concerns the methodological issue of a suitable database; while, thanks to large corpora, it is no longer a difficult task to find enough instances of a single word such as gay or a sequence such as going to, identifying less frequent co-occurrences of a node and its collocates throughout different periods is still challenging from a methodological point of view, since comparable data for diachronic studies – that is, samples of language from different periods in time which share the same features such as genre, context or register – is notoriously hard to find. Especially in earlier periods, preserved language data is rare. Furthermore, there are often only a few authors included who could make a sub-corpus for diachronic purposes rather biased towards an individual style. Another aspect is the potential (inter)relation between the functional-semantic change of a single lexical item, which could then again influence the combinatorial behaviour of these items. Therefore, this study will focus on the construction of creativity and change in a language acquisition context. Still, diachronic and cognitive change remain closely related, since both, as Traugott (2015) emphasises, are observable through speakers’ usage. Thus, chapter 8 will come back to the notion of change in the shape of grammaticalisation and lexicalisation and discuss their implications for this study as well as the value a concept such as constructionalisation might have for language acquisition and learning (Traugott 2015; Bergs 2012; Traugott/Trousdale 2010). For the purpose of this study, corpora, as well as selected judgement tasks and elicitation methods provide a larger database, which at the same time is more manageable in terms of context and creativity (> 5).

Investigating linguistic creative alternation against a language acquisition background, however, has two major implications: it shifts the focus from big C and ProC to little c or even mini c creativity, and it assumes that linguistic creativity is part of every individual’s linguistic system. As has been discussed before, both assumptions are supported by research into cognitive processes of creativity in general (> 3.2). As Boden (2013: 95–98) has outlined, creative thinking is based on combining and testing familiar concepts with a new level of application or interpretation. In language acquisition, this is essentially done from a very early stage, namely, when familiar concepts like hunger or desire are cognitively combined with new forms of articulation, like more cookies or gimmi. Since the basis of creative alternations of collocations also seems to be the acquisition of a new functional-semantic conception, this chapter will examine the most prominent approaches towards first language acquisition and discuss their perspective on the development of meaningful concepts and creativity. In the context of first language acquisition, there are often three major approaches which serve as a framework for most theories and models: Behaviourism, Nativism and Constructionism1.

Behaviourism, however, would not seem to be a suitable approach for a study which is partly concerned with creativity and creative alternations, since it suggests that language, like any other acquired behaviour, is learnt through operant conditioning. In principle, this means that as soon as an individual shows a required behaviour, s/he is rewarded – either positively, through receiving a treat, or negatively, by making a negative situation easier or more bearable. According to behaviouristic belief, this then motivates a participant or subject to repeat whatever s/he did to deserve a reward. This reinforcement can be used to train required behaviour as well as to break somebody of unwanted habits (Skinner 1957). As a consequence, behaviourist approaches can only account for the acquisition of controlled and conditioned input, which makes operand conditioning as the sole process of language acquisition unsuitable for any take on creativity and change (Chomsky 1959). Thus, chapter 4.1 starts with a review of selected nativist approaches which suppose that language is a uniquely human, partly inborn faculty, while 4.2 presents constructionist perspectives which take language as a usage-based, predominantly emergent phenomenon. In 4.3, selected models will be discussed in order to propose a model (> 4.4) which will then be used as a theoretical basis for the results in chapters 6 and 7. A summary of the major implications and consequences which can be drawn from this chapter will be provided in 4.5.