Linguistic Creativity : Rule-Governed or Rule-Breaking ?

Abstract

The essay starts from a proposition taken as an axiom : the centre of the practice of language is the dialectic of rule-governed and rule-breaking creativity. The dialectic is introduced at the levels of the sentence, of a natural language, of discourse and of literary genres. It is observed, through a consideration of linguistic change, formulaic language and a number of “grammatical errors.” Lastly, it is explained by recourse to Norbert Elias’s symbol theory.