Creativity of Phraseology in Contrast: Cinematic Discourse vs Discourse of Children’s Literature

Abstract

The article features the results of contrastive analysis of phraseological creativity in two discourse types, cinematic discourse and discourse of children’s literature. In the study, we develop the parametric approach to linguistic creativity, with the parameter of phraseology displaying both language and discourse specific character. Two compiled subcorpora of cinematic discourse and discourse of children’s literature contingent in size, genre, creation period, addressee orientation and key pragmatic strategy, serve to explore the activity (frequency) distribution of phraseology as well as its creative language productivity. The Theory of Phraseological Creativity provides the criteria for demarcating creative and non-creative uses of phraseological units. Their further analysis in two subcorpora has shown that whilst their total activity in both discourses is similar, it is the cinematic discourse that demonstrates significant prevalence in phraseological modification, which evidences in favor of its higher discourse creativity potential. The study helped reveal the specificity in the phraseological modification strategies applied in cinematic discourse in contrast with discourse of children’s literature. Furthermore, we addressed the problem of parametric contingency which brought forward other criteria in demarcating creative and non-creative uses of phraseology in discourse. To explore the linguistic creativity parametric contingency, we assessed the joint activity of parameters correlating with phraseology use. Following the procedures of parametric activity processing in HETEROSTAT software and vector-space modelling, we received two discourse-specific phraseological contingency profiles. Their contrastive analysis revealed higher contingency values in the discourse of children’s literature. Moreover, it disclosed discourse-specific functional differences in creative and non-creative phraseology use in the discourse types contrasted. Whereas non-creative phraseological units in cinematic discourse displayed low correlation with other parameters of linguistic creativity, their creative uses displayed higher correlation. The same did not stand true for discourse of children’s literature, which demonstrated high correlation in both cases. Consequently, we concluded that the stimulating function is more typical of linguistic creativity parameters activation contingent with the creative uses of phraseology. In discourse of children’s literature apart from the stimulating function, the contingent parameters also display the compensatory function, with both functions stimulating the children’s comprehension of phraseology and simultaneously enhancing discourse creativity. The results suffice to show that the distribution of two functions – compensatory and stimulating – is discourse-specific, which extends the knowledge about linguistic and discourse creativity.