See also: Armstrong, Lilias Eveline (1882–1937); French;

Jones, Daniel (1881–1967); Synchronic and Diachronic

Variation.

Bibliography

Collins B & Mees I M (1999). The real Professor Higgins: thelife and career of Daniel Jones. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Coustenoble H N (1929). A pronunciation dictionary of theFrench language based upon Gasc’s concise dictionary.London: Bell.

Coustenoble H N (1945). La phonetique du provencal mo-derne en terre d’Arles. Hertford: Austin.

Coustenoble H N & Armstrong L E (1934). Studies inFrench intonation. Cambridge: Heffer.

270 Coustenoble, Helene Nathalie (1894–1962)

Creativity in Language

E V Clark, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

� 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Speakers change languages all the time because theirneeds in using language change. One major type ofchange appears in the words people use and themeanings they assign to them. Speakers constructnew words to add to their vocabulary, to talk aboutnew trends and developments in society (boycott,sabotage, space-station) and to take into accounttechnical and scientific innovations (aviation, gene-splicing, parallel processing, flash-memory). And theydiscard terms that no longer serve any purpose – somethat are rarely used today include barouche, jerobo-am, wringer. This is why dictionary making is endless.Lexicographers track how speakers change theirwords over time, and the vocabulary of a languageis never fixed. Speakers continually add new terms fornew categories and adjust existing meanings to takeaccount of extensions (often metaphorical) and alsoshifts introduced by the addition of other words in thesame domains, for example the shift from guitar toacoustic guitar under pressure from the contrast withelectric guitar. Some new terms that speakers coin aretaken up by others, eventually by the speech commu-nity as a whole, and so become part of the currentconventional vocabulary. Other coinages are usedonce only, and then vanish again. In all of this, speak-ers effectively assign an indefinite number of mean-ings to a finite number of forms in the language theyuse. They do this by combining compositional mean-ings with pragmatic inferences dependent on the con-text, and so continually extend the resourcesavailable in new ways.

Coining Words

When speakers coin words, they do so to conveysome meaning that is not covered by the meaningsof existing words in the vocabulary. For example, a

fairly new verb like to farmer, meaning ‘play the roleof farmer (without being a real farmer)’ contrastswith its near-neighbor to farm, which designates theactivity of being a (real) farmer. In constructingthe forms of new words, speakers follow the rulesfor word formation in their language. In English, forexample, they can have recourse to novel compoundnouns (e.g., the circle-group vs. the oval-group,to describe two groups distinguished by insignia),to derived nouns and adjectives (e.g., among re-cent nouns a peace-keeper, the polluter; among recentadjectives internationally minded, safety-challenged),and to denominal verbs (to medal in an Olympicevent, to land a plane even on water, to e-mail themessage) (e.g., Clark and Clark, 1979; Marchand,1969). Other languages may draw on a slightly dif-ferent repertoire of options: French, for example, likeother Romance languages and like Hebrew, makeslittle use of compounding and relies much more ex-tensively on derivation for new words (e.g., Depecker,2001; Guilbert, 1975). In making use of such word-formation patterns, speakers generally choose themost productive forms – the patterns currently fa-vored by speakers – for the meanings to be expressed(Clark, 1993). This productivity of a pattern canchange over time. For example, the VerbþNounpattern used for forms like pinch-penny, toss-pot,and pick-pocket lost its productivity after this patternacquired a generally negative connotation in the1700s. Other patterns, such as NþV-er for agentiveand instrumental meanings (as in tomato-grower,cheese-cutter, picture-painter), may remain highlyproductive over many years. But speaker preferencesfor particular patterns and affixes can shift, and thistypically results in changes in the productivity ofparticular word-formation patterns and suffixesover time (Dubois, 1962).

Coinages are ubiquitous in everyday speech and inmany kinds of writing. While temporary or nonce usescome and go, other coinages may be regulated in thatlanguage academies often make recommendations

Creativity in Language 271

about new terminology. This happens in manycountries for new fields of enquiry where a languageacademy may simply keep track of the coinages thatspeakers come up with as the Swedish Academy does,or make active recommendations about the termsto use in specific domains, as in France or Israel(Berman, 1997; Clark, 1993). Most language acade-mies tend to focus more on written than on spokenforms of the target language, yet it is in their everydayspeech that people continually renew their language.

Children Coin Words, Too

Children start learning what the options are for con-structing words – the ways to put together stemsand affixes to express different meanings – fromthe earliest stages of acquisition. They may makeuse of some productive options in their languagefrom as young as age 2. Like adults, they coin wordsto add to their vocabulary and so extend their rangein talking about the objects and events aroundthem. In doing this, they apply patterns observablein the established vocabulary in constructing newwords: nouns such as sleepers for ‘pyjamas’, climberfor ‘ladder’, reacher for ‘someone who can reach along way’, and drummist for ‘drummer’, are typicalof the forms constructed by 2- and 3-year-olds. Theyalso construct new adjectives such as windy for‘blown by the wind’, or walky for a path ‘one canwalk along’, as well as new verbs like crack out for‘hatch’, oar for ‘row’, piano for ‘play the piano’, oruntight for ‘loosen’.

Young children have much more limited vocabu-laries than adults at first, so they may coin manywords illegitimately. That is, they coin a word toconvey a meaning for which there is already a con-ventional term. They may come up with forms likefarsee-er for ‘telescope’, to car for ‘to drive’, to rugfor ‘to vacuum [a rug]’, or to needle for ‘to mend’(Clark, 1993). These coinages are pre-empted by theconventional terms adults use for those meanings,and children give them up as they learn the appropri-ate terms. As children get older, they become moreadept at coining words where there are no existingwords with just the meanings they wish to express.They become sensitive to the relative productivity ofspecific patterns and affixes, and, like adults, favormore productive over less productive options. Alsolike adults, they continue to attend to transparencyin meaning – 2-year-olds prefer a compound likemagic-man over a derived form like magician inwhich the term magic is less discernible. They alsoattend to simplicity in form – 2-year-olds prefermaking the least possible change when they constructa new word form.

Language Revival

The 20th century saw the revival of several languages.The best known of these perhaps is Modern Hebrew,adopted by early Jewish settlers in the Near East astheir everyday language from the 1890s on. After theestablishment of the state of Israel in 1948, ModernHebrew was adopted as the national language.Speakers of Hebrew then had to create hundredsof new words for all the everyday things they need-ed to be able to talk about in modern life, fromtractors and engine parts to postal systems andschool-leaving exams. They borrowed extensivelyfrom other languages, through loan translations,and they coined words for whatever they needed inagriculture (including fish farming, raising turkeys,and meat packing), plumbing, child rearing, school-ing, and marketing, as well as in politics, economics,and science (Blau, 1981; Bolozky, 1999; Ravid,1995). Israel also set up an Academy of the HebrewLanguage to make recommendations about newvocabulary as speakers expanded the existing re-sources from historical and ritual varieties of Hebrew.The Academy continues to make recommendationstoday, often lagging behind speakers who take theinitiative before any official recommendation appears.

The Irish Gaelic language in Eire faced a similarchallenge as the government pushed for its revival aspeople’s everyday language (Watson, 2003; Wright,1996). Reintroducing Irish in geographic areaswhere it had not been spoken for several generations,and adding the range of vocabulary needed so itcould indeed be used for all everyday purposes pre-sented a formidable challenge. Speakers who hadretained their Irish tended to be from rural areasand rural occupations, so, as in Israel, the need fornew vocabulary in many social and scientific do-mains was extensive. Welsh faces similar challengesin maintaining itself as a full everyday language(Aitchison, 2000), as does Scots Gaelic and manyother minority languages that often received littleofficial support.

Other languages currently undergoing similarattempts at revival include a number of Australianaboriginal languages and American Indian languages(e.g., Amery, 2000; Hinton and Hale, 2001). In manycases, linguists have been called on to help devisewriting systems and help prepare teaching materials,so the languages in question can be (re-)introducedinto the community at the nursery school level andup, within the local school system. Few of these revi-vals, though, have gone as far as Hebrew or IrishGaelic in building up vocabularies adequate for allfacets of modern life. Yet this infusion of vocabularymay be a vital ingredient for endangered languages:

272 Creativity in Language

speakers’ willingness to invigorate the language withnew words may well be essential if a language is toremain viable.

Syntactic Units and Combinations

Do speakers construct entirely original, new utter-ances on each occasion, using syntactic rules to puttogether new combinations of terms, or do they relymore on ready-made phrases, chunks, and idioms?Within generative grammar, the traditional claim hasbeen that speakers can generate innumerable utter-ances that they have never produced before (e.g.,Chomsky, 1986). That is, speakers are assumed toconstruct original syntactic combinations, each onebuilt from scratch according to the rules. But doesthat claim really capture what goes on in most inter-actions? As native speakers, people have access to alarge repertoire of words, phrases, idioms, and con-structions, many of them very frequent in everydayspeech.

So an alternative view is that speakers typicallybuild their utterances from ready-made routines anda limited set of constructions. In relying on formulaicuses and routines in language, speakers tailor them totheir needs by inserting words, idioms, and phrasesthat result in new combinations within a construc-tion, and even thereby stretch the meaning of a con-struction. One reason for doing this is to takeadvantage of the chunks of language people store inmemory (Bolinger, 1976; Fillmore, 1979). This viewis consistent with recent work on the myriad syntacticforms, often designated as peripheral to a language,where ‘the rules fail’ (Culicover, 1999). Recentapproaches have tackled these as exemplifying caseswhere a construction-based, rather than a rule-based,approach may prove more explanatory of how speak-ers use language. The hypothesis is that when peopletalk, they work with constructions and formulaicchunks where they can fill variable slots to expressspecific meanings on different occasions (e.g., Kayand Fillmore, 1999).

Extending Language in New Directions

Creativity in language – stretching meanings andcoining words – is also a form of play, one delightedin by many writers who have stretched their languageto new limits. In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Keri Hulme’sThe Bone People, or Tibor Fischer’s The ThoughtGang, for example, each writer extends the meaningsof existing words through new juxtapositions andfigurative uses. And each writer coins many newwords to express new meanings. Poets like Gerard

Manley Hopkins (daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, or golden grove unleaving) or DylanThomas (the windfall light, the round/ Zion of thewater bead/ And the synagogue of the ear of corn) areoften major innovators in language, stretching mean-ings and adding new forms for new meanings. Andmany playwrights also extend the uses of a language.Here English speakers probably owe their greatestdebt to Shakespeare whose plays are the source ofinnumerable metaphors, figures of speech, andphrases generally taken for granted until we are star-tled to hear them fresh-minted in a speech from one ofhis characters.

The extent to which speakers exploit establishedand novel figurative uses of language in everydayspeech is unclear, but research on language processingshows that readers and listeners readily interpretnew uses, figurative uses, and extensions of existingmeanings without difficulty (e.g., Gerrig, 1993;Gibbs, 1994).

In summary, speakers are creative in their languageuse because language is never a precise map of whatthey wish to convey. Languages do not all select thesame elements in a scene to encode, but they selectenough to evoke events and their participants. Yetthis mapping leaves unmentioned many a detail, aswell as many changes in society itself. Speakers, wri-ters, poets, and children remedy such gaps by stretch-ing the meanings of the terms they have and byconstructing new words for the new meanings theywish to convey.

See also: Construction Grammar; Word Formation.

Bibliography

Aitchison J W (2000). Language, economy, and society.Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

Amery R (2000). Warrabarna Kaurna! Reclaiming anAustralian language. Lisse: Zwets & Zeitlinger.

Berman R A (1997). ‘Modern Hebrew.’ In Hetzron R (ed.)The Semitic languages. London: Routledge. 312–333.

Blau J (1981). The renaissance of modern Hebrewand modern standard Arabic. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press.

Bolinger D (1976). ‘Meaning and memory.’ Forum Linguis-ticum 1, 1–14.

Bolozky S (1999). Measuring productivity in word-formation. Leiden: Brill.

Chomsky A N (1986). Knowledge of language. Cambridge:MIT Press.

Clark E V (1993). The lexicon in acquisition. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Clark E V & Clark H H (1979). ‘When nouns surface asverbs.’ Language 55, 767–811.

Cree 273

Culicover P (1999). Syntactic nuts: hard cases, syntactictheory, and language acquisition. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Depecker L (2001). L’invention de la langue. Paris: Colin-Larousse.

Dubois J (1962). Etude sur la derivation suffixale enfrancais moderne et contemporain. Paris: Larousse.

Fillmore C J (1979). ‘On fluency.’ In Fillmore C J et al. (eds.)Individual differences in language ability and languagebehavior. New York: Academic Press. 85–110.

Gerrig R J (1993). Experiencing narrative worlds. NewHaven: Yale University Press.

Gibbs R W (1994). The poetics of mind. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Guilbert L (1975). La creativite lexicale. Paris: Larousse.

CreeH C Wolfart, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg,

Manitoba, Canada

� 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The Cree language exhibits an extraordinarily richmorphology, traditionally compared in its profusionto that of Ancient Greek.

Inflexion

The epistemological import of a statement, for exam-ple, may not only be indicated by particles such as esa‘reportedly’ or iska ‘by dream or revelation’ orthrough direct quotation, but also inflexionally, e.g.,in the dubitative form of the changed conjunctverb wehtinakwe ‘there he must have obtained him’in such sentences as . . . tanite mına wehtinakweaskihkwa. ‘. . . I wonder where he got a pail.’ Thestem ohtin- ‘thus or there obtain s.o.,’ which requiresan antecedent (tanite ‘whence’), is followed by thethematic suffix -a-, specifying a proximate (central)agent and an obviative (noncentral) patient of animategender. The dubitative suffix -kwe, finally, combineswith the ablaut (apophony) affecting the initial vowelof the word to express subordination to the interrog-ative and evidential modality.

Cree verbs are inflected in four major paradigms,with the stems themselves typically grouped into twoderivational pairs. Stative verbs differ by the genderof the agent, mihkwa- ‘be red (inanimate),’ mihkosi-‘be red (animate),’ while transitive verbs are distin-guished by the gender of the patient: pakamah- ‘strikes.t. (inanimate),’ pakamahw- ‘strike s.o. (animate).’Verbs of this last class specify both agent and patientinflexionally.

Hinton L & Hale K (eds.) (2001). The green book oflanguage revitalization in practice. New York: AcademicPress.

Kay P & Fillmore C J (1999). ‘Grammatical constructionsand linguistic generalizations: The What’s X doing Y?construction.’ Language 75, 1–33.

Marchand H (1969). The categories and types of present-dayEnglish word-formation (2nd edn.). Munich: Becksverlag.

Ravid D (1995). Language change in child and adultHebrew. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Watson I (2003). Broadcasting in Irish: minority language,radio, television, and identity. Dublin: Four Courts Press.

Wright S (ed.) (1996). Language and the state: revital-ization and revival in Israel and Eire. Clevedon:Multilingual Matters.

Their overall complexity aside, the inflexionalparadigms of Cree are also subject to substantialdialect variation, both in particular endings and inentire paradigmatic dimensions.

Number in Inflexion and Derivation

In the expression of grammatical categories, inflexionand derivation complement each other. The basicdistinction of number, for example, is that of singularand plural expressed inflexionally, e.g., iskwew‘woman; a woman; one woman’ vs. iskwewak‘women (more than one).’ The singular is unmarkedand in elevated prose may be used collectively, as inkosisiminaw ‘our grandchildren [lit. ‘our grand-child’]’; in a sentence like kıspin eka iskwew ota kı-pakitinikowisit ‘if women [lit. ‘Woman’] had notbeen put here [on earth] by divine powers,’ both thenoun iskwew and the verb (in the simple [unchanged]conjunct mode and with the third-person suffix -t-)show the singular. Quantifiers such as mihcet ‘many’heighten the literary effect of this device, e.g., mihcetnamoy kiskeyihtam ‘many do not [lit. ‘does not’]know this.’ Reciprocal stems construed as singulars,e.g., ayisiyiniw k-ayimohtot ‘that people [lit. ‘a per-son’] should gossip about one another,’ are a mark ofhigh rhetoric.

The number system of Cree is remarkable for itsrange of associative plural constructions; for exam-ple, a first person plural verb accompanied by asingular noun (here flanked by the demonstrativeawa) indicates a conjoint noun phrase including thefirst person: ka-sipwehteyahk awa nisımis awa‘when we took off, my little sister [and I].’ A thirdperson plural verb construed with a singular noun is