Author:

Keywords:

blending, creativity, interaction, mental spaces

Abstract:

Cognitive approaches to linguistic creativity have focused primarily on the construction of hybrid or layered conceptualizations on the basis of a variety of cogni tive processes, including analogical reasoning, conceptual blending and compression, frame-shifting, deautomatization and many others. In the majority of linguistic studies, the focus is on the creative end product of these mechanisms, rather than on choices and pathways that lead to that product. This can be explained by the fact that resear chers generally do not have access to the online meaning construction processes that language users employ in producing creative output. In this paper, we shift the focus of attention from a product perspective to a producer- and process-centered view on crea tivity. More specifically, we inquire into the incremental steps that language users take in generating novel conceptualizations. In order to gain access to these online strate gies of creativity, we make use of a corpus of video-recorded interactions, in which par ticipants were instructed to jointly reflect on future applications for mobile phones. The interactive set-up triggers the verbalization of thought processes and the joint construc tion of creative conceptualizations. The resulting data provide a wealth of information on pathways, recruitment and composition in creative reasoning. Three types of inter active conceptualization strategies emerge from the analysis of the corpus data: (i) the elaboration of jointly construed blends, (ii) a dynamic conceptualization pattern in which the partners successively scan different (conceptually associated) input concepts, and (iii) an incremental build-up of a complex blended structure through joint addition of rele vant new input.