Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Introduction to Linguistics

Fall 2006

Week 15 - Answers for discussion

Lee (2001) Chapter 13, Creativity and the nature of meaning

      In this the last week in his class we've decided to focus on the idea of creativity as a mean to trying to tie together observations about these two very different approaches to linguistics. It should be clear from our description of the generative approach that Chomsky's initial selling point of the approach is that it was able to easily describe what he thought was the creative nature of language. Basically what Chomsky claims is that from a finite number of different linguistic elements an infinite number of different utterances can be produced. What Chomsky and all generativists seek to do is to find the cognitive mechanisms which allow this type of creativity. More than this, Chomsky further claims that people are able to produce and understand utterances which they have not encountered previously. For him creativity simply comes from the actual structural process of producing and parsing novel structures. There is no concern for creating novel meanings, nor for how new concepts are encoded into language. Chomsky argues that such things do not happen normally (systematically) and that from a simply numerical situation creativity in producing utterances on a regular basis far outweighs any kind of creativity in producing new meanings. In short, according to Chomsky we are creating every time we produce any kind of utterance. All utterances are creative, even the most mundane ones. Now, in order for this to be true this means that we must build utterances from the bottom up (from the component parts) every single time. Certainly, in this view, we have principles and parameters of universal grammar to help guide us in this endeavor but in essence it is always a bottom up creative process. It has to be because the lexical items (lexemes) which are inserted into the structure are done so based on their category information and not on their meaning. Since meaning is cut out of the initial stages of the process than this structural process becomes the creative element and must be recreated every time a new utterance produced. This is important to rationalize because whether we are aware of it or not this is model we base all our teaching on. Almost all teaching principles are derived form this somewhat archaic model.

      Lee (2001), as a linguist with strong cognitive tendencies, challenges this Chomskyan view of creativity by employing the idea of meaning. As we've seen throughout this course one of the main challenges to, or indeed problems with, the generative model is that it separates structure from meaning. For many people working in the field of linguistics this is simply counterintuitive. It would be nice if it were true but language appears to be a bit more messy and a bit more involved than that. Thus, for Lee and other proponents of the cognitive model creativity comes not from the building of structures themselves but rather in how the structures are used to encode new meanings and new concepts. Structures are not a means in and of themselves, as in the generative model. They are the purveyors of meaning and for them meaning is essential. This is essentially what Lee (2001) tries to show us in his final chapter. He makes a great final push to show us that creativity and indeed meaning is cognitive and not structural. In the cognitive view creativity is inherent in mapping across mental spaces. Thus, it is not the forming of structures devoid of concerns of meaning which is creative but the joining of concepts or ideas taken from frames and/or radial categories and projected into mental spaces which shows genuine human cognitive creativity. I use the term cognitive creativity to underscore the belief that such creativity is not limited just to language but applies to general cognition as well. The implication, then is that language is a part of human general cognitive processes and capabilities and functions under the same restrictions. Now, once these mental spaces have been set up then different elements of each mental space are mapped together in order to achieve meaning. Any structure created will be a by product of the mapping process. Thus it is the creation of new meaning with old structures which is truly creative. It should also be mentioned that in the cognitive view this is not some sort of special of rarely occurring phenomenon, but rather happens all the time.

      Fauconnier (1997: 9-11) identifies three basic types of mappings which he terms projection mappings, pragmatic function mappings, and schema mappings. Projection mappings, also known as metaphorical mappings involve projecting part of one domain onto another. The general idea is that in order to talk about one thing we adopt the structure of something else and in the process borrow certain concepts and vocabulary items associated with the source. The simplest way of thinking about this would be to project a movie onto the surface of something else, a large mural perhaps. In this way the images from the movie (the projected source) will be on top of and be used to define (but not completely) the underlying (new, target domain) structure. A simple example would be taking the familiar structure of anger is heat (See Lakoff and Koevecses, 1987 for a detailed discussion of this structure). This structure is called a cultural model in that all speakers of English are familiar with it. Thus, it is hardly controversial to go one step further and claim that this structure is used to mold thought and as such is often projected onto other structures such as, John boiled in rage, or He ran about the room with steam coming out his ears. It should be clear based on the above discussion that both the development and the comprehension of such utterances is reliant on the source domain.

      Another type of mapping is the pragmatic function mapping. In such mappings two different categories of objects are mapped onto each other by a common pragmatic function. Thus, a painter and the painting she created can be identified by just one or the other term as demonstrated in the examples below.

(1) Bring me that Georgia O`Keeffe over there. (referring to a specific painting by Georgia O`Keeffe)

(2) Oh look here comes `the faraway`. (referring to Georgia O`Keeffe herself)

or

(3) Get a load of Mr. Spills A Lot over there. (referring to guy who must spill things often)

In such examples we can see how people or things can be blended with properties that are salient to them (as deemed by the speaker) and can then be referred to by those properties.

(4) Giant Head waltzed around the ballroom floor like a giraffe on speed.

This can be done for humourous purposes as in (4), because the speaker wants to draw the listener`s attention to something as in (3), or simply because the speaker does not know the name of the person/thing s/he is talking about as in (1).

      The last type of mapping mentioned by Fauconnier (1997) is schema mapping. In schema mappings an entire schema/frame is used to structure an situation. Thus, is someone says that this course was difficult the uttering of `this course` will open up a schema (Fauconnier`s term) or frame (Lee`s term). The opening of this frame not only allows the listener to understand the utterance as a whole (provided she has that frame) but enables her to make a judgement of the validity of the claim. She might utter in response, ̋No way! The Human Learning and Cognition course I took last semester was much harder than this class. We had to draw mental space mappings all the damn time̋. As we speak frames are projected into the discourses we create.

       As we discussed previously in this course, mapping is a regular process in the forming of utterances, but it is not always necessary. In the cognitive model not all utterances are created by a complicated mapping process. This is particularly true in informal conversation as argued by Lee (2001: 198).

(5) Good morning.

(6) Good morning my dove.

Example 5 shows an utterance devoid of any creative processes. In (5) a single mental space is opened for the utterance. Example 6, on the other hand, does show what cognitivists would call creativity. In this example a mental space would have to be opened for dove and the person being a called a dove as well as the speaker. The creativity, from the cognitive point of view, comes in mapping elements of the radial category for dove onto the person being called a dove. It is this and similar such processes which underlies the creative process in language.

      Based on this it is easy to see a connection between what cognitivists view as creativity and the word coining process and indeed there is a connection. If we understand that creativity is based on cognitive structure and/or linguistic structure and not linguistic structure alone we can see this connection. We are creative in taking pre-existing concepts and blending them together to form new concepts, or by taking features from one concept and applying them, in part, onto another concept. How this evolves linguistically is of little or no concern because linguistic structures are seen as by-products of cognitive processes. It is not on the structural level that creativity occurs except for the case when new linguistic elements are created as a result of a creative cognitive process as in the case of workaholic from alcoholic or spellathon from marathon. The moment of creation here is both cognitive as well as linguistic. It is cognitive in that features from the source concept are being mapped onto a preexisting loaner concept to create a cognitively new concept. It is a linguistic process in that the creative process just so happens to create two new morphemes, -aholic and -athon, in the process. Two new words have been coined and once the first -aholic word has been coined then others like chocaholic, loveaholic, meanaholic, etc. can be made (and for the other morpheme, just to be fair, sleepathon, rideathon, stinkathon, smashemupathon, etc.). On the one hand, the coining of all these new words, some of which I think I have just made up here, is a creative process. If, however, these new coinings become accepted as words in the language then they are no longer creative. They are just pulled down from the mental lexicon when their concept (in production) or form (in reception) is fired.

      From a historical point of view we can see that many of the `regular` forms in language originated as a result of creative processes. In fact all must have done so at some variantly distant point in time. As these forms are used more often and become more accepted they eventually make it into the lexicon as regular forms. At the point in which the forms are stored in the lexicon they cease to be creative in nature. They are simply called up when needed, not created. At the same time these now fixed forms become ready to be used creatively in their own right. In this view, forms pass through stages of development which are related to creativity and the creativity seems to be related to the degree of fixedness. All forms are potentially creative but in different ways.

      The evidence Lee (2001) provides is quite compelling as we have found throughout the book but he also fails to mention a few very important parts which one would need to understand in order to really feel comfortable with this (cognitive) model. For the most part this has to do with the basic format of our organization and treatment/use of the structural elements of language. It should be clear at this point that mappings are created based on what is stored in the brain. Mappings become both culturally and lexically entrenched over time and use, but even so the speakers who use such mappings on a regular basis remain unaware of them. ̋Rather remarkably, although the vocabulary often make the mapping transparent, we are typically not conscious of the mapping during use, and in fact are liable to be surprised and amused when it is pointed out to us.̋ (Fauconnier, 1997:9). Taking a slightly different view on the issue of creativity issue from Lee (2001), Fauconnier claims that there really is no difference between what is seen as a being creative (an initial instance of a blend) and an entrenched use of a blend. Fauconnier (1997) claims that extension from an entrenched structure is a regular creative process. But this brings us to the point that the brain must somehow list all these domains from which cognitive constructions are created.

      In this course we have mentioned briefly how the mental lexicon might be structured but basically from a generative point of view. We said that the lexicon is a storehouse of idiosyncratic linguistic information and this is the standard generative view. It should be mentioned at this point that in the generative view the mental lexicon can only be composed of words no more and no less than an actual word. This is because the generative model relies on the specific categories of a word in order to build structure. All other types of information are going to be outside the lexicon and outside the module of language. Obviously the cognitive model takes a very different view than the generative model, particularly in relation to the lexicon. Unfortunately, however, no cognitivist has tackled the job of trying to propose an exhaustive lexical design which corresponds to the potentials of the cognitive model. This is what we will briefly try to do here. This job is made somewhat easier by the overwhelming correspondences we find between aspects of the cognitive model and aspects of what has been termed the lexicalist position (there is no real lexicalist model yet). These correspondences are even more compelling because they were arrived at independently.

      The first major thing we need to come to terms with is that lexicon cannot be composed merely of words. In this cognitive model we have seen that blendings become entrenched in the language. This means that they must be stored in their complete form somewhere in the brain. If we define the mental lexicon as a storehouse of linguistic forms then in this must be the place where such entrenched blendings are stored. In fact, following Fauconnier's (1997) claim that all bits of language were originally blendings which have been extended or altered over time we can therefore say that really the mental lexicon is a storehouse of linguistic chunks used to reflect our perceptions of reality. From a linguistic point of view these occur at all different structural levels. Thus, in the cognitive mental lexicon we would need to store prototypes for specific sounds (phonemes), commonly used morphemes (principally derivational), words and word forms (and here we include all the variant forms of a particular base), as well as phrases and even sentences. Once more, it can be argued that all these different levels of structure are prey to schematic type of construction techniques (along the lines of Fillemore’s Construction Grammar). Words in English as well as sentences are prey to certain patterns. These patterns are often referred to as constructions and these constructions are seen as being prototypical patterns, both on the structural and semantic/cognitive level, which the language follows. It is these constructions which form the basis of how we linguistically compose language. But again, in the cognitive model we are not forced to rely on words alone. In this model we generally use chunks. It is here where the cognitive model and the lexicalist approaches converge. Both argue that chunks are major units in language. The lexicalists have arrived at this position by simply studying patterns of language use. The cognitivists have come to this position by studying patterns of language use in the relation to thought and cognitive processing. Thus, when we go to speak we pull down chunks out of the lexicon which reflect the meaning we wish to convey. The structure is secondary and can be extended an altered and played with according to further cognitive principles which we have not had the time to explore in this course.

      In conclusion it should be clear that in the cognitive model creativity is really seen as taking concepts which are stored in the mental lexicon both as conceptual structure and linguistic forms and extending them through blending operations which are either linguistically discernible or opaque. In order for this to happen this means that the mental lexicon needs to store a tremendous amount of information both linguistic but also in some ways cognitive.  Extra-linguistic information is necessary.