Some remarks on the dynamic aspects of language

The conception of language as one single closed system shared by all members of a monolingual society and consequently completely present in and completely mastered by each adult individually is now generally recognized as being inadequate. Such a conception is too static, too monolithic and too simple. Too static, because it is unable to explain why a language has the flexibility to adapt itself to and to cope with the ever-changing communicative and cognitive needs of society and its members. Too monolithic, because it does not take into account that a language is a delicate mechanism in which systematic and obligatory features of phonology and grammar interact with essentially non-obligatory semantic and grammatical devices which permit the user of language to engage in a productive and creative activity without jeopardizing successful communication. Finally, this conception is too simple, in at least two respects. First of all it presents a simplified account of the way language actually functions by suggesting that it can function independently of extra-lingual knowledge, that is knowledge which speaker and hearer have of the speech situation, of each other, and more generally of the world and the society in which they live.

Secondly, this conception operates with the simple view that in society the position of each individual member towards his language is basically the same, whereas in fact it displays a variety determined by social factors and by individual differences in linguistic skills.

It is the aim of this short paper to take a closer look at the dynamic nature of language by examining the productive and creative devices available to a native speaker.

Since Karcevsky’s Systè me du verbe russe and, even earlier since the Neo-grammarians, the concept of productivity has been recognized as being indispensable in the study of morphology. In all morphological research, diachronically or synchronically motivated, it is considered to be of prime importance to determine what is productive and what is not. Productive categories are characterized by natural expansion: new words can be and are being made by the speaker largely without any awareness that a new, previously nonexistent item is being produced, while the hearer for his part unhesitatingly accepts and understands it, again without any feeling of strangeness or newness. Although morphologically productive processes may be of a quite different nature (transpositional processes: dark (adj.) — darkness (noun), non-transpositional processes: Dutch ui, onion — uitje, small onion (both nouns), compounding and various mixed processes) one may say that the main function of these processes is to give the user of language the means to expand the lexicon without unduly burdening his memory. This is not to say that all speech communities and all individual users of language will show the same readiness to apply these processes in actual speech: some communities and some individuals are more conservative than others and prefer to cling to those items which already have a well-established position within language, only rarely daring to make use of the morphological potential of their native language.

One might consider people who are able to exploit the morphological potential of their language to be creative speakers, but the term “creativity” can better be reserved for those cases in which a speaker makes new words on the basis of improductive formations. This is known to happen occasionally. It is true that not all such new words are made on purpose. Sometimes they are made out of ignorance and are simply errors. However, in most cases, new words of this type are consciously made with the intention to create some sort of special effect. Poets, writers and in general all people who have a strongly developed linguistic awareness, and who might be called players of language games (not in the Wittgensteinian sense, of course), such as journalists, writers of commercials or advertisements, entertainers, cabaret artists and even sometimes linguists, are especially creative in this respect.

A good example recently produced by a linguist is the word iffyness, the result of a double process of transposition: first of a noun formed on the basis of the adjective iffy, itself based on the conjunction if which, like all other conjunctions, but unlike nouns, normally does not allow such a transpositional formation of the type leaf: leafy; silk: silky; room: roomy; bush: bushy; nut: nutty.

In contrast to words which are the result of the application of productive processes, words such as iffyness pose an interpretive problem to the hearer or to the reader. The speaker or writer presents some sort of challenge to his speech-partner. The special effects he aims at may be quite diverse. He may want to be facetious, or it may be that the newly coined word has an archaic flavor which is felt to be especially apt under certain circumstances or in a certain line in a poem. In the Binnick-case the author was clearly in need of a noun for a property of certain English verbs for which no term had yet been proposed. It seems reasonable to assume that both types of word-formation occur in speech everywhere. The normal expansion follows a number of easily identifiable and in principle exhaustively describable patterns, but the other type, which is the result of conscious reflection by the native speaker on his language, is erratic, creative and therefore essentially unpredictable.