Extravagance and creativity through the empirical lens

Theme session proposal for ICLC17 (Buenos Aires, July 14-18, 2025)


Convenors:

Stefan Hartmann, HHU Düsseldorf
Tobias Ungerer, University of Toronto


Call for papers

Creative and “extravagant” uses of language have drawn considerable attention in recent cognitive-linguistic work. Both theoretical approaches to delineating the concepts in question (Bergs 2019, Hoffmann 2018, 2024, forthc.) and empirical attempts at making them operationalizable using quantitative methods (e.g., Petré 2017, De Wit et al. 2020, Ungerer & Hartmann 2020, Baumann & Mühlenbernd 2022, Kempf & Hartmann 2022, Hartmann & Ungerer 2023, Neels et al. 2023, Morin forthc.) are currently flourishing. Following Sampson (2016), Bergs (2019) has influentially distinguished “F(ixed)-creativity”, i.e., the rule-bound extension of a pattern, from “E(extending)-creativity”, i.e., innovative uses of language that go beyond the current language system in some way. The concept of extravagance (Haspelmath 1999) in turn offers an explanation for why language users are E-creative in the first place: in order to be socially successful, they follow the maxim “talk in such a way that you are noticed” (Keller 1994). Constructions that have been discussed as examples of “extravagant” language use include reduplication patterns like fixer-upper (Lensch 2022) and shm-reduplication (Brexit, shmexit, Hartmann & Ungerer forthc.) or “snowclones” like [X is the new Y], as in ICLC17 is the new ICLC16 (Hartmann & Ungerer 2023) or [She X on my Y til I Z], as in She ebbin on my neezer til I scrooge (Lactaoen 2024).

Despite this surge in research on linguistic creativity, many important questions remain. Firstly, even though various authors have tried to offer operationalizable definitions, it is not entirely clear what exactly the concepts of (E-)creativity and extravagance encompass and how they relate to similar concepts such as expressivity (Gutzmann 2019), evaluativeness (see, e.g., the literature on evaluative morphology, Grandi & Körtvélyessy 2015, Battefeld et al. 2018), and salience (see, e.g., Schmid 2007, Schmid & Günther 2016, Boswijk & Colern 2020). Secondly, attempts to empirically operationalize such concepts are often in danger of circularity, as they tend to rely on the presence of other, similarly “extravagant” patterns in the vicinity of the target construction (e.g., the co-presence of emphatic markers, Petré 2017; other “extravagant” expressions in the context, Kempf & Hartmann 2022) or on crowdsourced but ultimately intuitive judgments (Ungerer & Hartmann 2020). Thirdly, another relevant open question in this context is how exactly notions like E- and F-creativity as well as extravagance relate to the concept of productivity (e.g. Barðdal 2008, Goldberg 2019).

This theme session aims to address these open questions by asking how we can assess creativity, extravagance, and related notions with the help of empirical case studies, and how such empirical studies can in turn inform our theoretical understanding of these concepts. In particular, we would like to bring together corpus-based and experimental work that showcases what sets “E-creative” uses of language apart from merely “F-creative” ones.

We invite 100-word abstracts until October 20, 2024. Please send your abstract to Stefan Hartmann (hartmast@hhu.de). We will let you know whether we can incorporate your abstract in the proposed theme session until the end of October. If our theme session is accepted, we will ask authors of provisionally accepted abstracts to submit an extended abstract (max. 500 words) via the conference submission system until January 15. The extended abstract will then be subject to peer review by the ICLC17 scientific committee. If the theme session is rejected, or if we cannot incorporate your abstract in the theme session, you are of course free to submit your abstract to ICLC17 for consideration as a general session paper.

References

Contact

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