Linguistic creativity and mental representation with reference to intercategorial

Abstract

In this thesis, the phenomenon of intercategorial polysemy is approached from two related but previously unconnected perspectives, namely that of linguistic creativity and mental representation. It is argued that the creativity that is part and parcel of the linguistic abilities of each and every human being, has been neglected in the study of linguistics, and should, in fact, form the basis of studies such as these in cognitive lexical creativity. It is argued that structural productivity (the generative view of linguistic creativity) and conceptual creativity lie on a continuum, the middle ground of which is covered by phenomena which are both productive and creative and which have both a formal and a semantic aspect to them. One such a phenomenon is intercategorial polysemy. Explaining the way in which speakers of a language such as English can systematically and productively produce and interpret words that belong to more than one syntactic category (for example, hammerN - hammerV, tableN - tableV, skyN - skyV), which may range from the conventionalised to the completely innovative, has long been a problem for linguists. Traditional morphological accounts involving theoretical notions such as zero derivation have always been found to be inadequate, mostly because zero derivation does not account for the variation in meaning and the background knowledge that is needed to produce and interpret novel instances. The main problem addressed in this thesis then is the question as to the nature of the lexical knowledge of speakers and its mental representation, so that it can form the basis for the cognitive processes that will enable language users to be linguistically creative. Various theoretical models that have been proposed to account for intercategorial polysemy, namely the representationalderivational model, the network-activation model, as well as the theory of conceptual integration (also called blending), are presented and evaluated in the light of a representative sample of completely novel instances of intercategorial polysemy.