Читать книгу Collocations, Creativity and Constructions - Cordula Glass - Страница 17

Despite their inability to account for linguistic creativity, behaviouristic approaches can indirectly take credit for being one of the foundations of modern, nativist approaches, since it was the lack of any discussion of creativity within language that, amongst other factors inspired Noam Chomsky (1959) to write his ardent review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (1957) and thus lay the foundations for generative linguistics1. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that generative linguists such as Noam Chomsky advocate the importance of analysis of creative language. In his 1964 publication Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, Chomsky even states the need to explain the source of novel, creative utterances as being one of the main objectives of modern linguistics:

The central fact to which any significant linguistic theory must address itself is this: a mature speaker can produce a new sentence of his language on the appropriate occasion, and other speakers can understand it immediately, though it is equally new to them. Most of our linguistic experience, both as speakers and hearers, is with new sentences; once we have mastered a language, the class of sentences with which we can operate fluently and without difficulty or hesitation is so vast that for all practical purposes […] we can regard it as infinite. (Chomsky 1964: 7)

According to Chomsky, any theory which attempts to draw a comprehensive picture of language needs to address the fact that, despite certain structural constraints, speakers of a language are able to produce novel yet generally accepted sequences of words by filling and recombining a limited set of words with a limited set of sequential structures (Chomsky 1972: 5–7, Chomsky 1965: 15). However, by referring to “new sentences”, it becomes clear that, in the beginning, Chomsky’s emphasis lay on syntactic structures. These, he claims, are part of an inborn linguistic capacity, which then allows the native speaker to produce novel sentences by filling syntactical slots with a finite set of lexical items. Later this model was altered and redefined from the initial idea of a Generative Transformational Grammar (Chomsky 1964, 1957) to a more refined concept in the shape of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995). The basic assumptions regarding the process of language acquisition remain throughout these developments: the faculty of language is a uniquely human ability, and sentences are derived from a deeper, inborn linguistic universal grammar. This observation leads Chomsky to conclude that “[…] there is only one human language, apart from the lexicon, and language acquisition is, in essence, a matter of determining lexical idiosyncrasies.” (Chomsky 1992: 55) At first glance, this statement gives the impression that, at a later stage, Chomsky puts lexical items and even phraseological phenomena at the very centre of his theory; yet, quite the opposite is the case. Within a nativist framework, a linguist’s attention revolves around the uniquely human and absolutely universal structures which are regarded as the basis of human language. Lexical items, on the other hand, are to be regarded as secondary. Thus, a strict separation of lexicon and grammar seems to be the logical consequence of Universal Grammar. Against this background, creativity is first and foremost to be regarded as novel lexical sequences which have neither been heard nor uttered before by a speaker of the respective language. This is, of course, directly aimed at Skinner’s assumption that language, like other mental faculties, can be trained and learnt by operand conditioning. But while this conception might explain sufficiently well why a sentence like colorless green ideas sleep furiously (Chomsky 1957: 15), despite its initial novelty, would not be disregarded as “not English”, it does not help to understand why pretty man carries a certain connotation, nor why this combination is remarkable. This is a question of how word meaning is shaped and created in the first place; a problem which Chomsky avoids by focusing on structural language universals which he regards as the core of language while dismissing idiosyncrasies or irregularities of any kind, like collocations or irregular verb forms, as periphery (1995: 19–20). There are, however, approaches within the nativist tradition which try to approach word meaning from a generativist point of view. One of them is the structuralistically inspired field of Interpretive Semantics (> 4.1.1) and the almost constructionist perspective of Conceptual Semantics (> 4.1.2).