Language Sciences 65 (2018) 1–8

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Language Sciences
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci

Sociolinguistics and language creativity

a b s t r a c t

Keywords This paper introduces the special issue of Language Sciences on Sociolinguistics and Lan-
Aesthetics guage Creativity. Current interest in language creativity is located within a wider interest
Creativity in creativity in everyday life, evident across the humanities and social sciences. The paper
Linguistic theory
argues that such vernacular creativity is particularly relevant to the concerns of sociolin-
Performance
guistics. The special issue considers how the adoption of a sociolinguistic lens may
Poetics
Sociolinguistics contribute to our understanding of creativity; and how the study of creativity in language
may itself contribute to sociolinguistic and linguistic theory. Creativity is theorised here in
terms of poetics (Jakobson, 1960); performance/critique (Bauman and Briggs, 1990; Hymes,
1981); Bakhtinian dialogics/heteroglossia (Bakhtin [1935] 1981); and aesthetics (e.g. Saito,
2015). We argue that a particular value of sociolinguistic analysis is its ability to reveal
micro processes of creativity: for instance aesthetic performance that emerges in the
moment, with the potential discursively to transform both language and social relations.
Aesthetics, it is argued, ‘carries the politics of discourse’ and its study may therefore also
enrich sociolinguistic theory. More broadly within linguistics, the study of creativity alerts
us to the plasticity, or messiness, of language, challenging the concept of ‘linguistic rules’
that is embedded within linguistic thinking.
Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

The past 20 years or so have seen increasing, and sustained, academic interest in the concept of creativity. Creativity has
been explored across academic disciplines, although there is a particular focus of attention within the humanities and social
sciences (see e.g. Boden, 1990/2004; Czikszentmihalyi, 1996; Sternberg, 1999; Craft, 2000; Pope, 2005; Kaufman and
Sternberg, 2010; Gla
veanu, 2014; Paul and Kaufman, 2014). Such explorations do not restrict themselves to exceptional
creativity, of the sort associated with particularly talented individuals. Academic interest in creativity extends to, and
sometimes focuses on, a broader conception that incorporates everyday and even routine activity – a focus that is consistent
with more widespread social scientific interest in, and re-evaluation of, everyday life. Writing within cultural studies, for
instance, Paul Willis and his colleagues (1990: 1–2) have argued that:
In general the arts establishment connives to keep alive the myth of the special, creative individual artist holding out
against passive mass consumerism . Against this we insist that there is a vibrant symbolic life and symbolic creativity
current in everyday life, everyday activity and expression – even if it is sometimes invisible, looked down on or
spurned. We don’t want to invent it or propose it. We want to recognize it .
Within the study of language, the field of stylistics has a long interest in the analysis of literary texts (for illustrations see
Jeffries and McIntyre, 2010). As in other academic areas, however, language studies have seen a growing interest in more
everyday forms of creativity. This shift is evident not only within stylistics, but also across fields such as applied linguistics and
sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and discourse studies. In these areas, the idea of language creativity is extended
beyond the realm of literature and high culture to incorporate a wider range of practices: playful and humorous discourse, wit
and irony, conversational imagery, linguistic manipulations of form and meaning in conversational joking, artful performance
on- and off-line. Such vernacular, demotic creativity is typically collaboratively constructed, adaptive, responsive to previous
texts and practices, and embedded in discursive activity around relationships and identities (Tannen, 1989/2007; Carter,

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2017.06.002
0388-0001/Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
2 J. Swann, A. Deumert / Language Sciences 65 (2018) 1–8

2004; Swann and Maybin, 2007; Swann et al., 2011; Jones, 2012; Deumert, 2014; Jones, 2016). Of interest in their own terms,
such creative practices have been drawn on by scholars to challenge the idea of creativity as timeless and produced by
exceptional individuals, invoking instead a democratic, contextualised and dynamic conception of creativity and associated
constructs such as literariness, art, and aesthetics.
Vernacular conceptions of creativity seem particularly relevant to sociolinguistics, with its dominant disciplinary preoc-
cupation with vernacular speech and the association of various language practices with the affirmation or disruption of social
relations and the social order. Although creativity, in the sense discussed above, is receiving greater attention within the
discipline1, it cannot, yet, be seen as mainstream. The papers in the special issue seek to build on and further develop this
interest, with an explicit focus on how sociolinguistic methods and approaches may advance the study of creativity in lan-
guage; and, conversely, how contemporary ideas about creativity may articulate with the concerns of sociolinguistics (and
linguistics more broadly). Two central questions are addressed:

How can the adoption of a sociolinguistic lens contribute to our understanding of creativity?

How can the study of creativity in language contribute to sociolinguistic and linguistic theory?

The papers presented here are written by scholars from different backgrounds and with research experience in different
linguistic and cultural contexts. The selection allows us to explore linguistic creativity across a range of practices (involving
combinations of modes and media, and variation within and across languages) within diverse geographical, linguistic and
cultural settings. In the words of Anne Storch, the papers explore ‘different creativities and different indexicalities of crea-
tively manipulated [language]’. They have in common a qualitative, broadly ethnographic methodology, allowing a focus on
creativity as this emerges in particular settings. The papers are:
Mimesis and mimicry in language – creativity and aesthetics as the performance of (dis)semblances: Ana Deumert, Uni-
versity of Cape Town, South Africa

Aesthetics, politics and sociolinguistic analysis: Mary Louise Pratt, New York University, USA

Microgenesis of language creativity: innovation, conformity and incongruence in children’s language play: Asta Cekaite,
Linköping University, Sweden

Cricket bats, #riotcleanup and rhubarb: everyday creativity in Twitter interactions around Test Match Special: Julia Gillen,
Lancaster University, UK

At the fringes of language: on the semiotics of noise: Anne Storch, University of Cologne, Germany

Linguistic Creativity and the production of cisheteropatriarchy: a comparative analysis of improvised rap battles in Los
Angeles and Cape Town: H. Samy Alim, University of California, Los Angeles, USA; Jooyoung Lee, University of Toronto,
Canada; Lauren Mason Carris, University of California, Los Angeles, USA; Quentin E. Williams, University of the Western
Cape, South Africa

‘You don’t have enough letters to make this noise’: Arabic speakers’ creative engagements with the Roman script: Ivan
Panovic, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Messy creativity (a response to the special issue): Rodney H. Jones, University of Reading, UK
In these articles creativity is theorised in terms of poetics (Jakobson, 1960); performance/critique (Bauman and Briggs,
1990; Hymes, 1981); Bakhtinian dialogics/heteroglossia (Bakhtin, [1935] 1981); and a politically and culturally motivated
conception of everyday aesthetics (Saito, 2015). Overall, the papers open up avenues for transdisciplinary dialogue about the
nature of creativity: if creativity is indeed widespread in social life, what contribution can sociolinguists make to larger
debates about concepts of creativity and creative practices?

2. Sociolinguistics and the study of creativity

In an early handbook of creativity, the psychologists Robert Sternberg and Todd Lubart define creativity as:
The ability to produce work that is both novel (i.e. original, unexpected) and appropriate (i.e. useful, adaptive con-
cerning task constraints).
(Sternberg and Lubart, 1999: 3)

1
Examples of recent interest in sociolinguistics include two colloquia on creativity in language, or discourse, presented at the 2014 Sociolinguistics
Symposium (Jyväskylä, Finland).
 J. Swann, A. Deumert / Language Sciences 65 (2018) 1–8 3

And, in a contribution to a more recent handbook, Ruth Richards offers the following definition:
Everyday creativity can be operationally defined using two product criteria .: first, originality (or relative rarity of a
creation within a given reference group) and, second, meaningfulness (being comprehensible to others, not random or
idiosyncratic, and thus being socially meaningful).
(Richards, 2010: 189).
As is common in definitions of creativity, Sternberg and Lubart, and Richards, associate creative action primarily with
novelty and originality: the production of something new that we didn’t have before. The sociolinguistic studies in this special
issue are consistent, in some respects, with this idea, but they also lead us to question the idea of novelty in any absolute
sense. Ana Deumert, for instance, identifies creativity as emergent, that is, following Homi Bhabha (1994) as ‘our ability to
bring a sense of “newness into the world”’. Deumert’s focus is on transformative social and linguistic action: ‘a refashioning of
something that came before.’ In her study of digital writing in South Africa Deumert distinguishes mimesis, the representation
and recontextualisation of semiotic signs on the basis of similarity; and mimicry, which self-consciously emphasises differ-
ence and alterity, e.g. in parody or mockery (a distinction related to Bakhtin’s unidirectional and varidirectional double-
voicing). Similar processes of refashioning and transformation recur across papers in the special issue: for instance, Julia
Gillen’s study of Twitter interactions around cricket commentary points to the playful recycling of utterances, including
tropes well-known within the cricketing community; Samy Alim, Jooyoung Lee, Lauren Mason and Quentin Williams discuss
rappers’ adoption and recontextualisation of racialised and gendered linguistic resources as they perform their own identities
and diss their opponents; Ivan Panovi c considers Arabic speakers’ appropriation and replication of particular forms of ‘script-
fusing’ to represent their names, and particular identities, online; and Asta Cekaite shows young children repeating and
adapting nonsense structures in jocular exchanges. At play across the papers, and discussed more fully by Cekaite, is a tension
between conformity and innovation, predictability and innovative transformation. The children in Cekaite’s study, for
instance, draw on recognised genres and recycled utterances to ‘re-calibrate expectations’ and ‘transform . routinized
structure[s]’, and it is in such processes of transformation that creativity resides.
The second part of the two definitions emphasises ideas of value and social meaning. For Sternberg and Lubart creativity
involves the production of something ‘appropriate’, a concept they relate to usefulness and adaptivity within task constraints.
Elena Semino, a stylistician who has worked with Sternberg and Lubart’s definition, uses the analogy of a chair to explain this
aspect of creativity: a creative design for a chair may produce something novel and even unexpected, but it still needs to work
as a chair (Semino, 2017: personal communication). Richards’s conception of what we need to add to novelty, while differ-
ently expressed, is broadly compatible. Richards argues that creativity does not involve randomness, or idiosyncracy: what is
produced has to be comprehensible to others, which she associates with social meaning. However these ideas – the second
part of the definitions – are open to question, as we consider below.
‘Appropriateness’ is of interest as a fundamental sociolinguistic concept. However critical (socio)linguists, in particular,
have always challenged its implicit neutrality (e.g. Fairclough, 1992), raising questions of who determines what counts as
appropriate, and whose interests are served by this designation. The broader sets of meanings and values associated with
creativity raise similar questions: by whom are particular practices seen as creative, novel, or of value? That is to say they raise
questions of power and access, judgement and evaluation. Sociolinguistic research has shown that the answers to such
questions are locally determined: what counts as creative (and valued, etc,) shifts across space, time, and participant roles.
Hence the emphasis in the special issue on recontextualisation: the transformation and reinstantiation of linguistic resources
involves the production of new meanings, values and social relations, and indeed new contexts, in the flow of interaction.
From this basis, we argue that the idea of ‘moments’ (cf Li Wei, 2011) is central to understanding creativity in social life.
That is, creativity is often fleeting, it ‘slips and slides’ in and out of focus, and its poetic patternings are ‘here today and gone
tomorrow, only to reappear the day after tomorrow’ (Law and Urry, 2004: 403). Paying attention to moments and transitions
allows us to understand the role of time in the enactment of creative practice: creative acts never stand alone, but occupy a
position in a sequence of acts. Methodologically, this is linked to a re-evaluation of anecdotes as data. Traditionally, socio-
linguists aspired to collect data systematically, akin to scientists. However, much that is important in social life is momentary
and systematic data collection may miss exactly that which is accidental and rare. Anecdotes, in other words, can illuminate
non-routine aspects of social life. This has been argued, for example, by Jane Gallup (2002) in her book Anecdotal Theory, and
by Adrian Pablé and Christopher Hutton (2015) in their discussion of integrationalist approaches to language. In the papers
presented in the special issue the theoretical potential of using anecdotes, and incidental data more broadly, is most visible in
the contributions by Mary Louise Pratt, Ana Deumert and Ivan Panovi c. All three contributors draw creatively on anecdotal,
incidental data: a memorized conversation, which shows the complexities of communicating in the ‘contact zone’; a single
SMS that allows us to explore mimesis as a theoretical concept and everyday aesthetic practice; and a creative, fused spelling
which embodies core aspects of semiotic and political agency.
This focus on creativity as emergent – on moments, transitions and mobility in the study of creativity – links theoretically
to the sociolinguistic ideas of intertextuality, and text trajectories (Blommaert, 2005), as well as the musical concept of
‘timing’ (to synchronize to an ensemble as well as to adjust expressive resources in subtle ways to achieve desired effects).
Sociolinguistics is especially valuable in its provision of methodologies for the scrutiny and understanding of such emergent
practices, evident particularly in the contextualised, qualitative approaches that characterise interactional sociolinguistics
and linguistic ethnography. Recent discussion of Giles Deleuze’s work on ‘becoming’, of creativity as part of the historical
process, may be relevant to further sociolinguistic theorizing (Lundy, 2012).
4 J. Swann, A. Deumert / Language Sciences 65 (2018) 1–8

Sociolinguistics may also bring a valuable critical stance, both to the objects of its enquiry and to its own practice. An
example relevant to the study of creativity is Dell Hymes’ work on ethnopoetics (1981, 1996), including the poetic patterning
of everyday spoken narratives (which he considers to be an integral part of narrative competence). Hymes has shown that
analytical attention – made visible in the transcription of narratives in stanzas and lines – is always a political move,
uncovering or, more accurately, constructing the ubiquity of the poetic and verbal art outside the corridors of libraries and
museums as well as the theatrical stage.
In the special issue, the application of a sociolinguistic lens to the study of language creativity allows the further explo-
ration of such ideas. The local interactional approach adopted in the papers allows a focus, specifically, on moments of
creativity: working at the micro-discursive level we can see creative linguistic practices as emergent within particular types of
interaction, contingent upon and responsive to times, places and social relations, but also transformative of these. Thus, in
Gillen’s study the recycling, via Twitter, of a well-known cricketing trope is a jointly produced creative activity, linking
interdiscursively to previous humorous exchanges in a radio programme that tweeters are following. The original tweet
performs its author as someone witty, but also with cricketing knowledge and expertise, and it invokes a cricketing com-
munity who will understand the references. The retweeting of this by the radio commentator at the centre of the Twitter
exchanges signals his expert appreciation, increases visibility and confers positive value. The playful repetition of sound play
in Cekaite’s study similarly involves closely coordinated interactional activity, and co-creativity between participants. This
process contributes to the building and sharing of social norms and values; it may subvert social hierarchies between children
and adults; display solidarity within the peer group; and produce re-alignments in social relations (e.g. excluding another
child, or repairing previous relational trouble).
Cekaite’s account of disruption in social relations (also visible in some of Deumert’s examples) challenges any uniformly
positive view of the workings of creativity, a point developed further and more critically by Alim and his colleagues in their
study of rap battles. Alim et al. are critical of celebratory conceptions of creativity that would see this as straightforwardly
progressive and liberatory. They show how the young male rappers they studied use verbal and visual forms of artistry to co-
construct particular meanings of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality and the body. While their performances ‘frequently unsettle
the dominance of Whiteness, they also just as frequently exploit stereotypical forms of Blackness/Colouredness that further
marginalize already marginalized gendered and sexualized bodies’. Creative language use may therefore involve both the
disruption and maintenance of forms of social oppression, and these processes are revealed and explored in the detailed
sociolinguistic analysis of interactional data.
Storch argues similarly that creativity is not simply playful and amusing: it may give voice to experiences of margin-
alisation, injustice and pain. Storch’s focus on creativity and ‘noise’ also poses challenges to the idea that creativity needs to be
meaningful. For Storch, creativity may be reflected in the ‘artful unmaking of words and meaning’ (our italics), related to the
use of deliberately unintelligible speech, taboo language and response cries. For instance in the Jukun communities (in north-
east Nigeria) studied by Storch, women’s performed narratives sometimes include unintelligible speech as a commentary that
reflects the narrator’s experience of not being understood, of being unheard. While Storch relates such speech to women’s
marginalisation in exogamous households, it was also seen, by some members in the community, as more powerful than
comprehensible speech – it might be a curse, or a spirit speaking through the woman. The fact of transgressing communi-
cative norms made the speech potentially powerful.
In these respects papers in the special issue help to address our first question: how can the adoption of a sociolinguistic
lens contribute to our understanding of creativity? The adoption of a sociolinguistic lens highlights the emergent and
contingent, transformative and strategic nature of creative practices; the significance of collaborative co-creativity; and
its critical potential. Happily, this broadly ‘contingent’ model, to use a shorthand, is consistent with contemporary ideas
about creativity evident across disciplines, including the work referred to in the previous section. What sociolinguistics
adds, however – particularly interactional, ethnographic approaches such as those reflected in the special issue – is a
focus on the micro-discursive processes that produce something as creative in interaction. In a break from ideas of the
lone, creative genius, contemporary studies see creativity as a more widespread phenomenon, socio-historically located,
and co-produced – i.e. a collaborative rather than individual achievement. As an extension to these ideas, sociolinguistic
analysis tries to catch creative practices in the moment of their articulation – for instance, within an interaction this
might involve a momentary shift into play. The interactional history that produced this shift here and now will also
shape meaning in the moment as interdiscursive antecedents are called up. In addition, interpersonal activity that
accompanies its production enters into meaning-making, as do aesthetic responses by the audience. The productive
study of such processes – a significant achievement of sociolinguistic analysis – is evident across the papers in the
special issue.
While sociolinguistic analysis enhances our understanding of creativity, this may also feed back into sociolinguistics itself,
demonstrating the potential to the discipline of this analytical focus. In the following section we consider how papers in the
special issue help to address our second core question: How can the study of creativity in language contribute to sociolinguistic
and linguistic theory?

3. Creativity and (socio)linguistic theory

In early 2017, after a day-long university seminar on youth language practices, one of us was part of an informal discussion
about language and its creative potential. During the conversation one of those participating in the exchange exclaimed
 J. Swann, A. Deumert / Language Sciences 65 (2018) 1–8 5

emphatically: ‘Language is revolution!!!’ The audience responded with murmured approval and head-nodding. And indeed,
language can be revolution: it allows us to articulate new ways of being, to share with others our ideas and dreams for an
entirely different world, a world where the constraints that we experience in the present can be imagined to be gone, a world
where everything seems possible. As such, language can bring about revolutions, that is, fundamental changes in the socio-
cultural and political order. J.M.E. Blanchard (1967), writing about the ‘orators of the revolution’, notes that they forge a new
language, a new way of speaking, ‘to explain a new era’ and ‘to express the reality of a new world’ (p. 65, 68). This is language-
as-action, or doing-things-with-words, in the sense of J.L. Austin’s speech act theory (Austin, 1962). It is a form of socio-cultural
creativity in which language is an integral part. In the special issue this is reflected, for example, in Panovi c’s analysis of the
creation of a logo, designed to capture the revolutionary movement in Egypt in 2011 that led to the resignation of the then
president, Hosni Mubarak. The designer of the logo, Marwan Imam, creatively combined Arabic characters and writing
conventions within an English phrase as ‘an act of rebellion’ and ‘ridicule’, and also saw the use of Arabic ‘as a sign of respect to
the revolution’s “Egyptian/Arabic” provenance’. Pratt discusses another instance of socio-cultural creativity: the narratives of
the DREAMers, undocumented migrants in the United States. The DREAMers defamiliarize America in their narratives,
describe it as a strange and forbidding place, and in doing so also affirm their own resilience. The narratives are a form of
‘coming out’, of becoming visible and making visible experiences that have long been silenced. And by making these ex-
periences visible a different version of reality emerges – maybe not a ‘big’ revolution in this case, but certainly a trans-
formation that remakes the world.
Creativity, in this context, is not simply about novelty and originality (a dominant criterion in the definitions discussed
above), but also links to ideas of poetics, aesthetics and performance: ideas that are discussed across all the papers in this
special issue. Particularly relevant here is the idea of performance as this has been theorised by the linguistic anthropologists
Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs (e.g. Bauman, 1977, 1986; Bauman and Briggs, 1990). This work reflects an artistic and
poetic conception of performance as verbal art: as a communicative act that invites an aesthetic response and evaluation by
an audience. In performance it is the skill and effectiveness of the act that is important, not just its referential meaning.
Performance, in this aesthetic sense, draws attention to, and produces a heightened awareness of, both the utterance and its
performer. It is seen as ‘the enactment of the poetic function, the essence of spoken artistry’ (Bauman, 1986: 3). Bauman and
Briggs (1990) focus on the critical potential of performance. Their argument is that, because they stand out and are held up for
evaluation, artistic performances may more readily be taken up and recontextualised in other contexts. The study of such
processes raises questions of power and legitimacy – e.g. who has access to particular forms of expression, their recontex-
tualisation and re-use (see further discussion in Maybin and Swann, 2007).
This artistic and critical conception of performance is associated with clearly demarcated performances, such as the rap
sessions analysed by Alim and colleagues, Pratt’s DREAMer videos, and Storch’s storytelling events. But it is also evident in
the micro-performances analysed by Cekaite, Deumert, Gillen, and Panovi c: the recurring shifts in and out of performance
and the recontextualisation of performed utterances that permeate everyday spoken and online interaction. In all such
contexts, performance has the potential to heighten and intensify the social and discursive processes that are the focus of
much sociolinguistic analysis – for instance in Alim and colleagues’ rap sessions, the performance of gendered and racialised
identities; in Cekaite’s study of young children’s talk, the progressive building of evaluative stances, alignments and re-
alignments, and acts of subversion. Pratt and Deumert argue more explicitly that sociolinguistics needs to incorporate
aesthetics into its practice (and its theory); in their case with an explicit analytical focus on language and discourse in the
contact zone. Aesthetics, in this context, is not simply about skill/play/performance and creating incongruity (‘making
strange’), but is also about the senses, about an intensity of feeling and emotion (following, e.g., Sommer, 2004; Mignolo and
Várquez, 2013).
In addition, aesthetics carries the politics of discourse; indeed, it is inherently political. Thus, the digital examples dis-
cussed by Deumert show how Twitter users produce texts that are simultaneously aesthetic and political, an artistic practice
that goes back to the Futurist movement of the early twentieth century. Consequently, as argued by Pratt, ‘[v]erbal aesthetics
are too powerful and important to be left implicit or ignored’ by sociolinguists. This is a point that is emphasised by Deumert
and Pratt: the goal is not only to recognize the aesthetic qualities of linguistic performance, but to theorize aesthetics as a core
element of language use, and thus sociolinguistic theory.
Interactional sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography, with their highly contextualised, critical and dynamic approach
to the study of language, are likely to be particularly hospitable to arguments about the need for an aesthetic analytical and
theoretical dimension, but this is less compatible with those areas of sociolinguistics that are interested in patterns and
regularities of use. This includes, especially, variationist studies and work in the tradition of the sociology of language. These
areas of sociolinguistics tend not to be interested in what Pratt (this issue) calls ‘the sublime’: that which is unexpected and
unusual, rare and pleasurable (or frightening).
Formal linguistics goes one step further and casts behavioural patterns and regularities as rules, and language as a rule-
governed system. It is precisely the question of ‘linguistic rules’, deeply embedded within linguistic thinking, which is
challenged by this collection of papers on everyday linguistic creativity. This brings us to another topic: creative language use
does not only do-things-with-words (as discussed above with reference to Austin’s speech act theory), often it does-things-to-
words; that is, it plays with linguistic form. And in doing so it challenges the very idea of ‘linguistic rules’. What are the limits
to, and the constraints on, linguistic creativity? Are there any? Or is it a question of ‘anything goes’?
Noam Chomsky’s (1957) work on linguistic creativity is a good starting point in exploring this question. Chomsky saw
language as infinitely creative, but also as firmly rule-bound. In other words, while language allows us to utter an infinite
6 J. Swann, A. Deumert / Language Sciences 65 (2018) 1–8

number of novel, never-before-heard sentences, the underlying form of these sentences will remain the same, following a
closed set of transformative rules. To illustrate this, Chomsky gives the following – well-known and much-cited – example:
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
Chomsky describes the sentence as ‘nonsensical’ and semantically ‘meaningless’. Yet, it is nevertheless ‘grammatical’ (i.e.
rule-following), because the syntax is modelled on sentences such as happy cats sleep calmly; that is, it follows conventional
phrase-structure rules. Roman Jakobson (1971), whose work on the poetic function of language has been central for our
understanding of linguistic creativity, criticized Chomsky’s analysis of the sentence harshly for not allowing, and recognizing,
the metaphorical power of language. Thus, Jakobson shows that attaching the experience of colour to a noun such as ‘ideas’ is
common in poetic language (Jakobson cites Andrew Marvell’s ‘green thought in a green shade’ as an example). It is also
widespread in folk-poetic expressions (Jakobson gives the Russian phrase ‘green boredom’, ifmfoa> slula zelenaya skuka, as
an example).
Jakobson argues that poetic language ‘means’ in particular ways: it moves away from the referential function of language
and cannot be studied from the perspective of truth value semantics. He notes that of a poetic utterance we would never ask
‘is it true?’ or ‘do you really mean it?’ (Jakobson (1971), p. 497). Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ([1953] 1999) well-known notion of
language games (Sprachspiele) can help to develop this idea further. Wittgenstein argues that in order to become competent
language users, speakers/writers need to acquire the ability to participate, via the use of linguistic signs, in various practices
and activities. In other words, they become skilled in a range of different language games. These games, in turn, follow
different conventions. Wittgenstein ([194-1948] 1970, x160) notes:
Vergib nicht, dab ein Gedicht, wenn auch in der Sprache der Mitteilung abgefabt, nicht im Sprachspiel der Mitteilung
verwendet wird.
Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game
of giving information.
Thus, within the Wittgensteinian ‘language-game of poetry’ (where true/false semantics do not matter), Chomsky’s
sentence can be experienced as meaningful; yet, within the ‘language-game of giving information’, it is experienced as
nonsensical (since ideas, as abstract nouns, don’t actually sleep, and a colour, green, cannot actually be colourless). In other
words, while the sentence does not conform to collocational preferences and truth-value expectations, it is precisely through
incongruity and semantic disruption that new meanings can arise. This brings us back to the notion of contingency (as
discussed in the previous section): utterances are always part of a specific language-game, they emerge at particular times/
places and people make sense of them in interaction (even when they declare them meaningless).
Chomsky provides a second example; this time not one that is grammatical-and-nonsensical, but one that is, according to
his analysis, ungrammatical-and-nonsensical.
*Furiously sleep green ideas colorless
Yet, this second sentence too can be meaningful if uttered with a different phrasal intonation. Consider the following
version (with the semicolons indicating intonational pauses).
Furiously sleep; ideas green; colourless
This second version of the sentence comes from a poem titled ‘A Line and a Theme from Noam Chomsky’ by the Australian
writer Clive James (published in 1986; see also Deumert, 2014: 170–171). Poetic ways of speaking reflect, according to
Jakobson (Deumert, 2014) mots en liberté (‘words in freedom’), they are part of a language-game that is unbound and un-
constrained. The freedom of words and sounds, and their ability to become meaningful, is illustrated, especially, in the papers
by Storch and Cekaite, which discuss the ways in which ‘nonsense’ words and sound sequences can become meaningful in
interaction (among both children and adults). Storch’s theorization of ‘noise’ not simply as sonic distortion but as the
interpersonal construction of obscurity and deliberate unintelligibility, suggests that it is necessary for us to pay attention to
that which was conventionally seen as being outside of language: cries and screams, gibberish and all forms of unintelligible
speech. As Storch notes, such ‘noise’ is nevertheless able to mean, and can indeed be taken up as a speech act: gibberish can be
a curse and as such can transform the status quo. It might not be doing-things-with-words (in the sense Austin envisaged it),
but it is certainly doing-things-with-sound.
3.1. Language as messy

A more helpful way of looking at the two examples provided by Chomsky is not to think of them as illustrating mean-
ingless or nonsensical language, but rather as suggesting the existence of different kinds of linguistic creativity: rule-bound
creativity and rule-breaking creativity. For Chomsky, who was committed to the idea of language as a rule-governed system,
the latter type of creativity (if carried out on the level of both semantics and syntax) would necessarily create impossible
sentences; that is, sentences no capable speaker/writer would ever produce. Yet, not all linguists are committed to an idea of
language as firmly and necessarily rule-bound. An alternative way of thinking about language is evident, for example, in the
work of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Eduard Sapir, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Roman Jakobson. It is, especially, visible in the more
recent poststructuralist turn in sociolinguistics, which sees the linguistic sign as fundamentally unstable and emphasises the
 J. Swann, A. Deumert / Language Sciences 65 (2018) 1–8 7

indeterminacy of meaning (cf. McNamara, 2012). The idea of language as ‘messy’ also emerges as a theme in the commentary
on this special issue by Rodney Jones when he draws attention to the fact that speakers/writers don’t just follow rules, they
also break rules. Throughout his contribution Jones remarks on ‘the inherent messiness of language itself, with its maddening
ambiguities and inconsistencies’.
A view of language (and creativity) as messy, not structured and clearly patterned; as allowing rule-breaking just as much
as rule-conforming utterances; as inherently poetic, aesthetic, performed and performative is evident in all papers present
here. It is rooted in an understanding of language as not just referential, a tool for communication, but as expressive and
indeed aesthetic experience. Creative language leads to excess of meaning. David Gramling (2016) argued in The Invention of
Monolingualism, that excess was a ‘key vice for seventeenth century linguistics’, a time when language began to be ever more
tightly controlled by scholars. Yet, views of language as bounded and controllable predate the age of European vernacular
grammars: Paul Bonfiglio (2010) dates such discourses to the early fourteenth century (and especially to Dante’s De vulgari
eloquentia, ‘On the eleoquence of the vernacular’, circa 1304). In the longue duree of European thought, these discourses
formed the foundations of modern linguistics. This is visible in Ferdinand de Saussure’s ([1916] 2013) image of disembodied
speakers (‘talking heads’) who pass well-formed messages from one to another in a so-called ‘speech circuit’, a closed system
in which meaning is tightly controlled. The language of the Saussurian ‘speech circuit’ does not allow for the excess (or as
Jones writes, ‘messiness’) of creative language, nor does it allow us to understand the workings of power and inequality in
language (Pratt, 2012). Mikhail Bakhtin ([1965] 1984), reflecting on the European renaissance, comments on what he calls the
creative ‘interorientation’ between different ways of speaking (including both glossodiversity, diversity of linguistic codes, and
semiodiversity, diversity of meanings; see discussion in Halliday, 2007). We see this ‘active plurality’ in Gillen’s paper which
draws directly on Bakhtinian thought: even though the tweets she discusses can all be grouped as ‘English’, they show
complex diversities of speaking/writing, responding to one another, echoing one another, creatively transforming language in
the process. It is such contact between forms and meanings which creates excess as freedom from constraint, from nor-
mativity. Bakhtin ([1965] 1984) notes that in such moments ‘[e]ven formal grammatical construction became extremely
plastic’ (p.471). Creativity for Bakhtin – and for the authors of the papers in this special issue – challenges linguistic
dogmatism, whether this relates to the prescriptive rules of traditional grammarians or the phrase structure rules of modern-
day linguists. Linguistic creativity does things-with-words, thus unmaking society, and it does things-to-words, thus un-
making language. It is here that we also see the criticality of creativity, its ‘ability to question and problematize received
wisdom’ (Li Wei, 2011). In doing things-with-words-and-to-words everyday linguistic creativity instantiates a Wittgen-
steinian language-game of poetry, a complex semiotic practice which is oriented towards an audience (performed, perfor-
mance), which triggers a form of affect (aesthetics), and is fundamentally transformative.

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Joan Swann *
The Open University, UK
Ana Deumert
University of Cape Town, South Africa
E-mail address: [email protected]

 Corresponding author.
E-mail address: [email protected]