Linguistic Creativity in Generative Grammar

This workshop is organised in association with the BieLeiCoS2025 conference.

Workshop Abstract

In generative grammar in the Chomskyan tradition, linguistic creativity is mostly taken to be the availability of a limited set of rules (word formation, recursive application of rules) to create an infinite number of expressions. This kind of creativity has frequently been called productivity.
While productivity is certainly one crucial aspect of linguistic creativity at play in (morpho)syntax,  language users also seem to be able to create new expressions that do not conform with their existing rule system, but are successful in expressing an intended meaning. There is little research in synchronic linguistics of the mechanisms that allow for creating new expressions on the spot. One such process that is frequently mentioned in functional and construction grammar approaches is analogy.  Project A01 of the CRC1646 investigates analogy in various dimensions in (morpho)syntax on the basis of a range of long distance dependencies and aims to formalize such creative deviations from the rule system for generative grammar frameworks.