CRC 1646 „Linguistic Creativity in Communication“

In a constantly changing world, language as our primary tool of communication must allow for the effective expression of novel thoughts and experiences. This requires linguistic creativity, i.e., the creation of novel linguistic units that are used in communication just as successfully as linguistic routines. Linguistics has made significant progress in the last 50 years in understanding the regularities and routines behind conventionalised systems of linguistic signs, their underlying cognitive processes and how to model them. Thus far, the linguistic creativity that frequently occurs in everyday conversation has not been addressed with the systematicity that it deserves. CRC1646 will undertake such a systematic investigation of linguistic creativity as a vital feature of speakers' linguistic competence. Our starting point is creative linguistic activity in everyday communication, the resulting products, and how they can spread into a larger community. The individual projects will shed light on the properties, limits, benefits of linguistic creativity and the interplay of these different aspects including its theoretical, psycholinguistic and computational modelling. Based on this, the CRC will provide a detailed description of the phenomenon, its mechanisms and processes and develop a comprehensive theory of linguistic creativity in communication, in individuals and among the collective of language users. Our research endeavour is guided by an analytical framework and a set of central research goals and hypotheses. Our team consists of 32 principal investigators and around 40 research fellows.