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.