Beyond the Lexicon: Creativity in Language Production
- 1 September 1988
- journal article
- Published by Taylor & Francis in Metaphor and Symbolic Activity
- Vol. 3 (3) , 1-19
- https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327868ms0301_1
Abstract
We describe a number of communicative goals that lead speakers to produce creative utterances. We argue that speakers produce utterances that incorporate, for example, metaphors, lexical innovations, or indirectness, because they wish to express their intended meanings as accurately as their language allows. Speakers, we suggest, also create new meanings because of the social demands on them. Finally, we discuss the consequences of creativity for theories of language production.This publication has 20 references indexed in Scilit:
- Test of the mention theory of irony.Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 1984
- Understanding old words with new meaningsJournal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1983
- Learning to coin agent and instrument nounsCognition, 1982
- Toward a cognitive psychology of syntax: Information processing contributions to sentence formulation.Psychological Review, 1982
- When Nouns Surface as VerbsLanguage, 1979
- Responding to indirect speech actsCognitive Psychology, 1979
- Contextual effects in understanding indirect requests∗Discourse Processes, 1979
- On the Creation and Use of English Compound NounsLanguage, 1977
- Metaphors and Modalities: How Children Project Polar Adjectives onto Diverse DomainsChild Development, 1974
- An Analysis of the Interaction of Language, Topic, and ListenerAmerican Anthropologist, 1964