Language Creativity and the Poetic Function. A Response to Swann and Maybin (2007)

Abstract

The current renewal of interest in language creativity raises a number of intriguing problems, as is evident from the stimulating papers in the recent special issue of Applied Linguistics. According to the editors of this issue, however, these papers are not concerned with creativity in a general pragmatic sense but more specifically with poetic creativity, which they define, following Jakobson, as ‘a focus on the message for its own sake’. I argue that this formalist definition is misleading and that one needs to consider other factors in Jakobson's account of the speech event, and crucially how they inter-relate with each other, and that this, in turn, brings up general pragmatic issues as discussed in Searle's speech act theory and Grice's co-operative principle that are directly relevant to an understanding of how creativity is achieved. I conclude that there is no distinctively poetic way of being creative by focusing on the message form, but that creativity is a function of how the message form interacts with other speech act conditions and so has to be accounted for in general pragmatic terms.