Skip Navigation


Applied Linguistics Advance Access originally published online on July 21, 2008
Applied Linguistics 2008 29(3):503-508; doi:10.1093/applin/amn027
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
29/3/503    most recent
amn027v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Widdowson, H. G.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© Oxford University Press 2008

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

H. G. Widdowson

University of Vienna


  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.

Received for publication 1 June 2008.
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.