Abstract
The chunking problem is central to linguistics, semiotics, and poetics: How do we learn to organize a language into patterns and to use those patterns creatively? Linguistics has mainly offered two answers, one based on rule inference through innate capacities for processing and the other based on usage and on outstanding capacities for memory and retrieval. Both views are based on induction and compositionality. The Parry–Lord theory of oral composition-in-performance has argued that oral singers produce complex poems out of rehearsed improvisation through the mastery of a system of formulas, chunks that integrate phrasal, metrical, and semantic structures. The framework of formulaic creativity proposed here argues that the cognitive study of oral poetics can provide crucial insights into the chunking problem. I show the major connections between Parry–Lord and usage-based cognitive linguistics, mainly Construction Grammar and Frame Semantics. However, these approaches still remain compositional and thus struggle to model creativity and learning in oral poetry and everyday speech. The alternative is to explore a model of formulaic creativity not based on compositional patterns, but on wide learning for connecting discriminative perceptual features directly to semantic contrasts within a complex dynamic system, without the intermediation of a set of discrete units.
Funding source: Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowship for Advanced Researchers
Funding source: Ramón y Cajal grant
Award Identifier / Grant number: RYC-2016-20872
About the author
Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas is a Ramón y Cajal Assistant Professor at the English Department of the University of Murcia, an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in Quantitative Linguistics at the University of Tübingen, and a member of the International Distributed Little Red Hen Lab. He works on cognition and poetics, conceptual integration, embodiment, time across language and the arts, oral poetry, and multimodal communication.
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