6 Creativity and language
In this section you’ll move to look at the relationship between language and some slightly more abstract or theoretical concepts.
One of the great strengths of human language is that it’s almost endlessly flexible. With a small group of standard sounds, or the set number of letters in an alphabet, we can express our feelings and ideas about almost any experience we encounter. Using that small collection of sounds or set number of letters, you can combine them to produce sentences which will never have been uttered by anyone else in the world before – and yet are still meaningful to anyone who speaks the same language as you.
It’s because of this property that the notion of creativity is so important for the way we use language. In some ways, every time we open our mouths to speak we’re engaging in a creative act in that we’re creating meaning for others to interpret. But this would be a rather broad definition of creativity. The video below looks in a more focused way into the relationship between language and creativity, at what we mean when we say something is creative, and at why the concept is so important in our lives.
Activity 7
Before watching the video, have a think about the following questions:
- How would you define ‘creativity’ if you were asked to do so?
- Do you think that creativity, as you’ve just defined it, is an important part of our everyday language use?
- Are there specific uses of language, or specific contexts in which language is used, which are particularly dependent on linguistic creativity?
Jot down any thoughts you have about this in the text box below. Once you’ve done so, save your answer and then read the comment.
Transcript: Video 7 Language and creativity
SPEAKER 1: Language and creativity. What is creativity? And what does it have to do with language? Creativity is a notoriously difficult concept to define. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as--
SPEAKER 2: The faculty of being creative, ability or power to create.
SPEAKER 1: The word derives from the adjective ‘creative’, which means--
SPEAKER 2: Having the quality of creating. Able to create. Relating to or involving imagination or original ideas.
SPEAKER 1: And this, in turn, comes from the verb ‘create’.
SPEAKER 2: To bring into being. Cause to exist. To produce where nothing was before.
SPEAKER 1: A dictionary definition only gets us so far. We can also look at how other people have defined it and the key features they’ve identified for it. Creativity is--
SPEAKER 3: Intelligence, having fun.
SPEAKER 2: The process of having original ideas that have value.
SPEAKER 3: Every act of creation is, first of all, an act of destruction.
SPEAKER 2: Creativity is not a capacity of special people, but a special capacity of all people.
SPEAKER 1: But perhaps it’s easiest to start by looking at the different contexts in which linguistic creativity can occur. This range includes high literary art.
SPEAKER 2: O, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?
SPEAKER 3: Tyger Tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night.
SPEAKER 1: And also everyday communication.
SPEAKERS: Education shouldn’t be a death sentence. Education shouldn’t be a death sentence. Education--
SPEAKER 2: People found guilty of not using punctuation deserve the longest sentence possible.
SPEAKER 1: We can also look at the wide range of ideas and practices that creativity can involve.
SPEAKER 3: Poetic. Dramatic. Literariness. Aesthetic. Foregrounding.
SPEAKER 2: Defamiliarisation.
SPEAKERS: Artful. Playful. Imaginative. Translating--
SPEAKER 2: Translating.
SPEAKER 3: Adapting. Revising.
SPEAKER 2: Revising.
SPEAKER 3: Remixing. Repeating. Recycling.
SPEAKER 2: Repeating, repeating.
SPEAKERS: Performance. Participation. Evaluation.
SPEAKER 3: Critique.
SPEAKER 1: Across all these definitions, a few key ideas crop up again and again. Creativity is seen as something which is new or novel, which is valued and which is appropriate to its context. But even pinning it down to these key ideas just leads to further questions.
SPEAKER 2: What does it mean to be novel?
SPEAKER 3: What counts as being appropriate?
SPEAKER 2: How can we judge value?
SPEAKER 3: And who decides?
SPEAKER 1: So how do we take an analytical approach to creativity? We can start by thinking of it in terms of three different aspects. We can look at it in terms of its products.
SPEAKER 2: Tyger, Tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night.
SPEAKER 1: In terms of the processes it involves.
SPEAKER 3: A lamb walks into a baaah.
SPEAKER 1: And in terms of the purposes to which it is put.
[LAUGHTER]
When we study it, we can focus on different elements of the phenomenon and we can use different lenses to do this. We can use a textual lens to look at how language is manipulated in various ways to create a particular effect.
SPEAKER 2: Tyger, Tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night.
SPEAKER 1: We can use a contextual lens to examine how meaning is tied to the social, cultural and historical context in which the communication takes place. And we can use a critical lens to examine the values and assumptions that are embedded in the context. For example, we can look at how value is assigned to act of creativity and the implications this has for society.
SPEAKER 3: 45 once, 45 twice, sold at 45 million.
SPEAKER 1: So where does this leave us? When people talk of something being creative, what they're usually doing is making a value judgment, and usually, a specifically positive value judgment. A highly--
SPEAKER 2: Creative--
SPEAKER 3: Piece of work--
SPEAKER 1: Sets his--
SPEAKER 2: Creative--
SPEAKER 3: Spirit in motion--
SPEAKER 1: Looking for--
SPEAKER 2: Creative--
SPEAKER 3: Alternatives.
SPEAKER 1: Tokyo’s a great--
SPEAKER 2: Creative--
SPEAKER 3: City.
SPEAKER 1: An all-around--
SPEAKER 2: Creative--
SPEAKER 3: Thinker.
SPEAKER 1: She’s a unique--
SPEAKER 2: Creative--
SPEAKER 3: Artist.
SPEAKER 1: People take a number of different positions about how exactly it should be studied. For example, whether the focus should be more on the products of creativity or on its process.
SPEAKER 2: Tyger, Tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night.
SPEAKER 1: But despite these differences, it remains a very important topic for people from a wide range of disciplines.
SPEAKER 2: And the reasons for this are because of the key roles it plays in human communication.
SPEAKER 3: The fact that it’s a way of making what we say or write stand out, of initiating and responding to change.
SPEAKER 1: And ultimately, of organising our understanding and experience of the social world.
Comment
As the video argues, to call something creative is to appreciate the effect it has in the conversation, especially in the way it makes us see things in a novel light. The concept is often associated with art, literature and high culture, but some sort of linguistic creativity can be found in almost any example of language use. There are, however, some domains in which it’s more salient than others and you’ll look at a couple of these in the next two sections.