Creative Use Of Language Research Articles

Playful, coded, and emotional language: Discursive strategies of online criticism on Chinese social media

Language has always been essential in collective actions. Because offline collective actions are highly controlled in China, Chinese people often resort to online criticism, which heavily relies on the creative use of language to circumvent the government’s control of public communication. This study collects and analyzes the data of the #JiangshanjiaoandHongqiman# public discourse on Weibo to investigate the discursive characteristics of Chinese people’s online expressions. In February 2020, a mass organization of the government launched two official virtual idols on Weibo, one of the most widely used social media platforms in China. Amidst widespread discontent with the management of the pandemic, this intervention in fandom culture triggered a backlash among the Chinese Internet users. This study shows that the Chinese netizens expressed criticism through coded, playful, and emotional language. This article contributes to the literature on discursive strategies of online public discourse in China.

GENERATION Z’S LINGOS ON TIKTOK: ANALYSIS OF EMERGING LINGUISTIC STRUCTURES

The internet is an environment where users display the prowess in language and all forms of semiotic resources for different forms of communication. The current study examines Generation Z’s use of language in order to highlight the emerging forms of language structures on TikTok, as a result of the innate ability of humans to create new forms, mostly in verbal communication. The research questions are: What are the forms of construction of Generation Z’s lingo on TikTok? What semantic peculiarities are Generation Z’s lingo on TikTok characterized by? The premise of this study is that, Generation Z’s creative use of language on TikTok, shows the innate ability of humans to create new forms, and adapt to the affordances of new platforms in using language for communication. Crystal’s (2005) propositions concerning Internet Linguistics— the Stylistic perspective is applied in this study. Fifty Tik Tok videos were downloaded from the TikTok platform, some of the videos had the same lingos, in which case only one of such videos was chosen. Seventeen videos were used, each video was played; the part of the video that had the Generation Z’s word(s) was screen shot and used as the data for the analysis. In all, seventeen images were used. Findings show that the Generation Z’s lingo is replete with: acronyms used as full words in speech, combination of words and image in speech, the use of neologisms, esoteric words, and laconic structures. Some words and phrases have new meanings in addition to their previous meanings; all these show a new variety of the English language. The study recommends that language users should deploy the affordance of new internet platforms to freely express themselves, in doing so, naturally, new varieties will spring up and widen the lexicon of the English language.

The Impact of Literary Discourse on the Evolution of English Lexicon

This study explores the significant role of literary discourse in the evolution of the English lexicon, analyzing how works by authors such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, and Joyce contributed to the development of new words and meanings. By combining qualitative and corpus-based methods, the research highlights the creative and innovative use of language in literary texts, tracing how words originating in literature entered mainstream usage. The study examines the influence of different genres, particularly drama and prose, on lexical expansion and discusses how literary creativity extends beyond word invention to reshaping existing terms. Findings suggest that literary texts serve as crucial drivers of linguistic change, shaping the dynamic evolution of English vocabulary across centuries. Future research may explore the impact of digital literature and other modern forms of media on lexical growth.

THANKS AND GOODBYE: A CORPUS-ASSISTED DISCOURSE ANALYSIS ON EMOTIONAL DISTRESS IN BTS’ SUGA’S K-POP COMPOSITIONS

Mental health issues have become prevalent among music artists, more specifically among Korean pop (K-pop) idols. Bangtan Boys’ (BTS) Agust D (aka Suga), for a time adopted his alter ego to voice out his inner turmoil. Using corpus discourse analysis grounded on emotion-focused therapy framework, we analysed the linguistic patterns used by Agust D in his trilogy of mixtapes i.e., Agust D, D-2, and D-day released in 2016, 2020, and 2023. Findings showed his creative use of language in describing his contrasting emotions e.g., fear and anger. Linguistic evidence suggests that his anger is a primary maladaptive emotion which channelled self-criticism triggered by fear and shame, and denial of his feelings was a form of self-defence. Changes in the linguistic patterns were significant as they presented his state of mental well-being, coming to terms with his inner struggles, and fully embracing his true self.

Finding constraints to foster creativity in language learning tasks: An autoethnographic approach

AbstractTeachers often repeat language learning tasks and materials with students year after year. Although some tasks do not render satisfactory outcomes, students' performances can serve as valuable historical autoethnographic data that teachers can reflect on to improve their teaching materials and language learning tasks. In this article, using autoethnography as a pedagogical tool, I share my thinking and experiences regarding one task type (the simile task), which I have used with students over the years to develop creative language use (language creativity). I reflect on various similes produced and attempt to discover how to redesign the somewhat imperfect task to optimize creative language use. In particular, I try to find new constraints that can be set up to funnel the creative behaviour of the teacher and students. Before promoting students' creativity, teachers must nurture their creativity under various self‐imposed constraints. Teachers' personal experience is a valuable source when implementing creative language teaching. This article shows two task constraints that can be set up to stimulate creativity in language learning tasks: exclusionary constraints (avoiding confirmation‐based salient patterns) and focusing constraints (requiring the use of violation‐based salient patterns). It also shows how we can identify micro‐constraints to be excluded or focused on.

Designing for Dynamics in Dynamic Narrative Inquiry

This article addresses the question “How is dynamic narrative inquiry dynamic?” To do that, I present principles of dynamic narrative inquiry, with a focus on the active authoring of meaning in research interactions as in everyday life. Drawing on prior examples of activity-meaning system research designs and dynamic narrative analyses, I illustrate how this authoring process involves creative use of language and literary forms to express and transform interactive meaning with diverse others and one’s self. A goal of the article is to increase researchers’ sensitivity to the fact that paying attention to how everyone communicates offers major and otherwise overlooked insights into what everyone is saying about the issue of interest.

Politeness and impoliteness in social network service communication in Korea

With the technological benefits and challenges computer-mediated communication provides, interactants in social network service (SNS) communication are driven to use language creatively, overcoming the disadvantages and exploiting advantages. This creative language use leads to innovative language change that often extends beyond SNS environments. In this regard, the medium is not merely a restrictive but also a facilitative factor. Communicative acts are fundamentally bound by the interactants’ desire to express politeness, especially in face-threatening acts, well articulated in Brown and Levinson’s (1987) model. In recent research, however, the issues of the norms of politeness and impoliteness as well as those of appropriateness have been highlighted (Locher Watts 2005, Locher Bousfield 2008). Interactants employ not only mitigating strategies to alleviate face-threatening but also use impoliteness strategies, which are often disguised politeness. Drawing upon the data from a 26-million-word corpus of synchronous SNS communication, involving two or more participants, in 3,836 instances, developed by the National Institute of the Korean Language, this paper addresses how SNS interactants make use of diverse elements of language to show their polite and impolite stances in interpersonal negotiation. For instance, interactants use fragments, interjections, letter-based ideophones and emoticons, exaggerated punctuations for emotiveness, omission of regular punctuation marks, intentional violation of orthographic rules, prolific slang expressions, deviated spelling to create cuteness or intimacy, among numerous others. All these creative strategies lead to language change at lexical, grammatical and discourse levels.

The Beauty Terms Used in True Beauty Webtoon: The Word Formation Analysis

The researcher conducted an analysis of the word-formation of beauty-related terms used in Yaongyi's Webtoon "True Beauty." The primary objective was to identify the morphological processes involved in creating these beauty terms within the storyline. The study utilized qualitative methods, with the researcher as the main instrument, collecting data on various words and phrases related to beauty found throughout the Webtoon. In total, the researcher identified 62 beauty terms from the selected episodes and subsequently categorized them according to word-formation processes proposed by O'Grady (1997) and Yule (2010). Six main word-formation processes were identified: compounding, derivation, clipping, borrowing, conversion, and backformation. Among these, compounding was found to be the most prevalent method of word formation for beauty terms in the "True Beauty" Webtoon. The study revealed that compounding was the dominant process for forming beauty terms in the Webtoon "True Beauty," which differed from a previous investigation that focused on technology terms in other Webtoons and showed a prevalence of process affixes. These findings suggest that language styles can be influenced by specific subject fields. Furthermore, the researcher discovered several new terms not present in standard dictionaries like Oxford or Cambridge, highlighting the creative and innovative language use within the context of the Webtoon.

Introduction

Abstract Metaphor research has witnessed tremendous changes in how metaphor is seen and understood. Traditionally, metaphor has been viewed as a special, creative, and noticeable use of language. Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory (1980) has marked a cognitive revolution by viewing metaphor as pervasive in language as well as fundamental to thought and action. More recently, the discourse revolution has re-emphasised metaphor’s manifestations in language and its function in communication. A methodological revolution has brought forth procedures to identify and analyse metaphor in naturally occurring data (such as MIP and MIPVU). Despite these advances, in the present introduction, we identify four challenges that we believe metaphor researchers are still faced with: (1) How metaphorical are metaphors? (2) whose metaphor is it anyway? (3) metaphor research needs more diversity; and (4) how to study metaphor empirically – qualitatively or quantitatively? We conclude by presenting outlines of the contributions and specify how they address these issues.

THE EPILOGUE OF DENNIS LEHANE’S MYSTIC RIVER: A SYNTACTIC ANALYSIS

The study aims to analyze the epilogue of Lehane’s Mystic River. It employs syntactic approach, and it is qualitative in nature. Departing from the fact that novel is considered as a form of creative writing, syntax with its syntactic analysis then enables the researcher to go deeper into the epilogue of Lehane’s to understand its creative use of language. The five sentences in the epilogue are studied to find out how Lehane produces his clause types and thematic relations in his novel. The results yield the five sentences in the epilogue are all finite clauses for they have a finite verb in each. In terms of thematic relations, each verb in the five sentences of Lehane’s epilogue assigns different thematic roles. Each verb has different lexical representation. Verb come in Datum 1 assigns Agent and Source. Verb pull in Datum 2 assigns Agent and Theme. Verb look in Datum 3 assigns Agent and Location. Meanwhile Datum 4 has two thematic roles (Theme and Location). Datum 4 has no Agent in it. Verb block in Datum 5 assigns Agent, Theme, and Location. The four thematic roles have different state of percentage where Agent occupies the highest number of 36.36%. It is followed by both Theme and Location of 27.27% respectively. Source, in contrary, has the lowest number of 9.09%.

Blame Shifting: A Unique Phase in Bengali Children’s Meaning Acquisition Process

‘Blame shifting’ or ‘deflection’ is generally a psychological process where something is passed over to someone else in an attempt to draw attention away. It is a type of defense regarded as emotionally unmannerly. But in this paper, blame shifting has been presented as a positive aspect, representing a general phase that children go through during their first language acquisition period. When children acquire meaning, they shift blame, that starts as a psychological process but linguistically represents the creative use of language in different ways. In this paper, I tried to present the phase of blame shifting of ten participant children as a medium of meaning construction in their first language acquisition process. In an attempt to break the stereotypical assumption of the term ‘blame’, this paper would try to reflect how children shift blame on others as a part of their language development by manipulating language use and cognitive intelligence.
 Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh (Hum.), Vol. 68(1), 2023, pp. 99-118

Attack of the snowclones: A corpus-based analysis of extravagant formulaic patterns

The concept of ‘snowclones’ has gained interest in recent research on linguistic creativity and in studies of extravagance and expressiveness in language. However, no clear criteria for identifying snowclones have yet been established, and detailed corpus-based investigations of the phenomenon are still lacking. This paper addresses this research gap in a twofold way. On the one hand, we develop an operational definition of snowclones, arguing that three criteria are decisive: (i) the existence of a lexically fixed source construction; (ii) partial productivity; (iii) ‘extravagant’ formal and/or functional characteristics. On the other hand, we offer an empirical investigation of two patterns that have often been mentioned as examples of snowclones in the previous literature, namely [the mother of all X] and [X BE the new Y]. We use collostructional analysis and distributional semantics to explore the partial productivity of both patterns’ slot fillers. In sum, we argue that the concept of snowclones, if properly defined, can contribute substantially to our understanding of creative language use, especially regarding the question of how social, cultural, and interpersonal factors influence the choice of more or less salient linguistic constructions.

Crossing language boundaries. The use of English in advertisements in Polish lifestyle magazines

Advertising is an area open to various types of innovation and a creative use of language. Advertisers use a variety of strategies to attract as many customers as possible, employing enticing visuals, clever puns, detailed descriptions, direct appeals, etc. Yet, if the product is to sell, it appears self-evident that the language of the advertisement should not constitute a barrier. Contrary to this assumption, however, there has been an ever growing trend visible in Polish magazines for the last two decades to formulate parts of or even complete advertisements, not infrequently of Polish brands, in English, despite the fact that English remains a foreign language in Poland, although, admittedly, a very popular one. The present study is conducted within the framework of sociolinguistically informed linguistic landscape analysis. It investigates the visibility of English in the advertising landscape of lifestyle magazines published in Poland, represented by a selection of high quality and mid-range general interest and specialised women’s and men’s magazines. Its objective is to identify tendencies in the manifestations of this newly developing multilingualism in respect of the frequency of using English, the category of advertised products which particularly often appear in such multilingual advertisements as well as the type of magazines which admit such advertisements rather readily. Regarding the linguistic strategies used in the analysed texts, attempts are made to establish whether English tends to be used in complete texts and sentences or only parts of those, and if the latter, which elements of the genre of advertising are especially marked by such language choices and why.

인공지능시대의 창의성 함양과 영어교육

In the age of AI, creativity is a key concept in education. English education requires to improve a student’s communicative capabilities through AI tools, without ignoring ambiguous, complex communicative situations that are difficult to handle with AI information systems. It is necessary to explore and express a student’s experience that cannot be easily handled through explicit rules and regulations of information systems including systematic coding. Narrative in English education encourages a creative imagination that frees students from communicative stereotypes, and promotes creative destruction for possible innovations. This paper suggests to nurture a student’s creativity by fully utilizing the narrative in English education classes. Students actively engage in narrative inquiries, recreating and recontextualizing languages instead of simply reproducing them. Foreign language learners should not be obsessed with survival need and confined the transactional language function of transmitting information. Narrative inspires them to develop their social and cultural selves through creative language use in new contexts. Narrative is an effective means to promote English communication skills and to forster creativity.

AN ECOLINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF CIRCE BY MADELINE MILLER: RECONSTRUCTING THE RELATIONS AMONG DIFFERENT FORMS OF BEINGS THROUGH FIGURATIVE RECONCEPTUALIZATIONS

Madeline Miller is one of the most renowned "revisionist mythmakers" in the 21st century. Miller's prize-winning novel Circe (2019) is an attempt to recreate the histories of the mythological past in the revised versions of herstories. Madeline Miller intends to deconstruct the phallogocentrict narrations which have established the literary canon by recreating the same stories from a feminist perspective. To do so, she rewrites the myth of Circe who is a formidable sorceress and is treated as a minor character in the male-authored The Odyssey. Miller explains what she aims to do as follows: "I wanted her to be the center of the story. I wanted it to be an epic story about a woman's life. And for her to have all the attention and all the adventures and the growth, the errors,the virtues,that heroes like Achilles and Odysseus have in their stories" (Nicolau, 2018, p. 7). In this sense Circe can be described as a "female epic" or a "mythographic metafiction" (Nunes, 2014, pp. 231-232). Miller, along with the perspective, changed the dominant ideologies embedded in man-centered epics and she subverted androcentrism and a hierarchical view of the world with her ecological insight. This article will place the emphasis on Miller's creative use of language through which she promotes a novel understanding of intra and inter-specific relations in the universe. Thus, it will examine Miller's stylistic choices with an ecolinguistic approach by focusing specifically on her use of similes to find out why she employs this figure of speech with high frequency and what discursive effects she has created and what ideological implications her use of similes offer. The ecolinguistic examination of how and why she employs the similes in Circe reveals that Miller skillfully brings together an ecologically conscious language and thought to reflect her vision which can be characterized as ecosophic wisdom.

The pragmatics of creative language use in East Asian languages

The pragmatics of creative language use in East Asian languages

A corpus-based investigation of the English translations of Mao Zedong's speeches.

This study adopts a corpus-based approach to examine the linguistic features manifested in the English translations of Mao Zedong's speeches, taking Winston Churchill's speeches (representative of normalized spoken texts) and the spoken texts in BNC Sampler (representative of original spoken texts) as the reference corpora. By investigating the macro- and micro-linguistic features, it is found that the translated Mao's speeches (both direct and inverse translations) differ from normalized spoken texts as well as original spoken texts in three aspects: (i) macro-linguistic features, (ii) the use of personal pronouns, (iii) the use of modal verbs. In terms of macro-linguistic features, the average word length of the English translations is higher than that of normalized spoken texts and that of original spoken texts; the standardized type/token ratio and average sentence length of the English translations are higher than those of original spoken texts, but lower than those of normalized spoken texts. Meanwhile, in terms of the use of personal pronouns, the English translations of Mao's speeches prefer the underuse of the first person singular pronoun I. Furthermore, as far as modal verbs are concerned, the English translations of Mao's speeches prefer the overuse of must and should on the one hand, and the underuse of shall, could, may, and would on the other hand. Therefore, it can be said that the translated Mao's speeches exhibit some particular linguistic features, which can not only be differentiated from normalized spoken texts, but also be distinguished from original spoken texts. They are in a middle position in relation to normalized spoken texts as well as original spoken texts. This in-betweenness not only exhibits Mao's creative and idiosyncratic language use, but also reflects the influence of the language transfer from Chinese into English.

Creative use of language in a literary text (an analysis of Urszula Kozioł’s poem Jest mi miałko… (I’m feeling bland...) based on assumptions of linguistic poetics)

This paper presents the assumptions of linguistic poetics, a direction that combines – in a curricular manner – the research on poetry and interpretation of poetic works with an analysis of language uses in a statement. It presents the role played by M.R. Mayenowa in shaping this stream in the Polish literary studies seeking support in linguistics and enumerates the most significant curricular studies and linguitic concepts employed in analyses of the represented world of poetry as “the world behind words”. The enclosed analysis of the lyric by Urszula Kozioł Jest mi miałko… (I’m feeling bland...) is an illustration of the methodology presented here. It shows the sense-creative capabilities of language activated in a description of an unusual state of the lyrical I of the poem–confession, who is experiencing elusive feelings that are hard to express. The whole complex organisation of the poetic statement serves the purpose of outlining these unique experiences and the evoked senses can be reached only through an in-depth analysis of the language uses in the text. Keywords: creative use of language – poetry – linguistic poetics – Urszula Kozioł – description – confession

‘Probability’ and ‘Possibility’ in Creative Language Use: on Impossible Possibility in German Texts

Being culture-dependent, stylistics involves choice of facts and of linguistic means for exposing events cohesively in narratives for coherent chains of arguments in discourses. Both factual accuracy and logical consistency rely on epistemic warrants especially when verification procedures are not directly available. Ascribing reliable sources to opinions makes the facts and arguments conveyed in narratives and in discourses more or less probable, especially if their guarantors’ reputation is high enough, cf. “Tell me who thinks so, and I’ll tell you if this view is probable”, or even “and I’ll tell you if you are right”. Acceptability and creativity of language use depend on subconscious statistics, with their scales and measures of possibility and probability: infrequent ways of informing are the best candidates for being considered creative. Lexical items ‘(im)possible’, ‘(im)probable’, ‘(in)feasible’, ‘can (not)’, ‘may (not)’, etc., with negative marks and without them, normally serve as truth-conditional “hedges” of judgments, as their weak epistemic warrants. Their use, too, may be more or less creative and depends on mental cultures in the framework of which narratives and discourses are produced and interpreted. This paper analyzes double hedge constructions in which a modal verb and an adverbial meaning ‘(im)possibly’ or ‘(im)probably’ are jointly used in sentences, e. g. ‘can possibly’ and ‘might probably’ in English. These constructions look strange or even ungrammatical in Russian, but they are not infrequent in German. In this research, being based on a large corpus of fictional and non-fictional German texts. It is shown that statistically, these double hedges are most frequently used for focusing on negative commitments, especially in sentences with ‘unmöglich können’ (“can impossibly”). At the same time, the frequency of ‘kann unwahrscheinlich’ (“can improbably”) is utterly low.

Digital rockets: Resisting necropolitics through defiant languaging and artivism

This article draws from our ethnography in the Complexo do Alemão favelas (neighborhoods built by residents) in Rio de Janeiro to discuss how Black activists bring affordances of digitalization and enregistered practices into broader arenas of political participation. We unpack our own positionality and experience with the armed surveillance and securitization of normative regimes that challenge (and often cooperate with) the state in governing peripheral and, to a lesser extent, central areas in Brazilian cities. Favela residents are disproportionately affected by these violent forms of securitization. We look to their ordinary digital and enregistered languaging and ‘artivism’ as a means of surviving necropolitics that are proper to the African diaspora. In dialogue with the sociolinguistics of globalization and the sociology of violence, the study provides ethnographic evidence of situated cooperation and creative use of language and technologies. We believe this may offer promising paths for further objectives, including antiracist education and comparative studies of grassroots activism.