This is a conceptual and programmatic talk aiming to contribute to grasping the nature of creativity in word-formation and phraseology. Creativity is often defined as balancing out originality and effectiveness. I interpret originality as degrees of deviation from convention and effectiveness as degrees of successful mutual understanding. Patterns in word-formation and phraseology provide speakers with the resources needed for being lexically creative when coining new words or expressions. The challenge for exploring creativity in the domains of word-formation and phraseology is that the schemas and templates that are available in these domains offer considerable scope for regular creativity (i.e. productivity), but also for daring deviations from existing conventions.

I resolve this tension by relying on Sampson’s (2006) distinction between F-creativity and E-creativity and my own Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model. I discuss systematic ways in which speakers exploit word-formation and phraseology for acts of linguistic creativity which are salient to different degrees and can be creative vis-à-vis different dimensions of regularity. Essentially, they can pertain to the symbolic dimension of regularity and affect form-meaning pairings, the syntagmatic dimension, affecting combinatorial regularities, and/or the socio-pragmatic dimension, affecting functional, situational and social regularities. The role of factors widening or limiting the scope for creativity, among them individual cognitive routines, is also discussed and included in the proposed definition of linguistic creativity.

Hans-Jörg Schmid ist seit 2005 Professor für Moderne Englische Sprachwissenschaft an der Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität München. Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte liegen in der kognitiven Linguistik, lexikalischen Semantik, Wortbildung, Korpuslinguistik, Pragmatik und Sprachtheorie. Seine  wichtigsten Monographien sind: Dynamics of Linguistic System. Usage, Conventionalization, and Entrenchment (Oxford 2020), Englische Morphologie und Wortbildung. Eine Einführung (Berlin 2005, übersetzt ins Englische, derzeit in 3. Auflage(2016)) und zusammen mit Friedrich Ungerer: An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics (London/New York: Longmann 1996, 2. Auflage (2006) übersetzt ins Chinesische und Japanische)