Unwitting Inventors: Speakers Use -ly-Adverbs More Creatively when Primed

Abstract

Abstract Speakers may use language creatively because they want to be extravagant, or because they need to communicate content for which no conventional coding solution exists. In addition, however, there is a third motivation for creativity that is both more fundamental and less conspicuous. Speakers are creative because their mental access to linguistic resources is limited and variable – a factor referred to here as ‘availability.’ In this paper, corpus data from the spoken British National Corpus and from the Hansard Corpus are used to show that speakers of English use the morphological pattern of -ly-adverb formation (as in correctly, locally, poorly etc.) more creatively when they have recently heard or used another -ly-adverb. This manifests itself in higher type frequencies – hence, more varied forms – for -ly-adverbs. The effect can be ascribed to priming, and indicates that the creative use of a linguistic resource depends on factors that facilitate mental access to it.