Improvisation, Creativity, and Formulaic Language

Abstract

The key element of transformational-generative grammar, or what is often referred to as "the Chomskyan revolution in linguistics," is the claim that after only limited and contingent exposure to the data of spoken language, speakers are effortlessly able to produce new, accurate, and appropriate utterances in their native language, which other speakers can immediately understand. Noam Chomsky stated in 1964 that "it is evident that rote recall is a factor of minute importance in ordinary use of language, that a minimum of the sentences which we utter is learnt by heart as such that most of them, on the contrary, are composed on the spur of the moment."1I More recent work in linguistics, however, suggests that much speech and writing in our native language is enabled by the internalization of a vast number of institutionalized utterances, or lexical phrases, or fixed and semi-fixed expressions; and that conversely, our inferior performance in foreign languages is often at least partly due to our lack of instantly recalled lexical phrases. I will argue that a great deal of linguistic performance, both speech and writing, does not involve improvising phrases and sentences ex nihilo (i.e., from a vocabulary of several thousand words or lexical items and a basic stock of internalized grammatical patterns or "rules"), but is rather a case of deploying prefabricated, institutionalized, and fully contextualized phrases and expressions and sentence heads, with a grammatical form and a lexical content that is either wholly or largely fixed. Not unlike the oral-traditional heroic poets of Homer's day, we routinely rely on a vast store of fixed, prepatterned phrases, which we use more often than we generate locutions entirely from scratch. Real data show that we are much less original in using language than we imagine. I. INSTITUTIONALIZED UTTERANCES