Chapter 3 Speech Activity as Creativity

Most linguists believe that although the language is social, i.e. serves all native speakers of this community, “speech is always individual.” And some linguists bluntly state that a speech act is an “act of creativity”. Generally speaking, if speech is “always individual,” then it is logical to consider each of our statements as creativity. True, then it is not clear whether the creative potential of the person who put the monologue “To be or not to be?” Into Hamlet’s mouth differs from the potential of another person who asks: - Do you go to a lecture today or not? .. They can say: the creative potential of Shakespeare is higher , but the potential of a doubting student should not be underestimated. You can, of course, argue like that. But you can first (before discourse) open the “Philosophical Dictionary” and read: “Creativity is an activity that generates something qualitatively new that has never happened before” No way In the face of such a definition, a student’s doubt expressed in the form above can no longer be considered a “creative act": the phrase-doubt has been expressed, has been and will be expressed countless times. And, moreover, the phrase is based on such a long-known model that it is possible to replace all the components in it with many others: “Put on this tie now or not put on?” “Eat these dumplings at once or not eat?” and so on and so forth.

“ The currant leaf is rude and materchat, ” wrote Boris Pasternak, and no literary scholar would disprove the belonging of this line exclusively to this poet. Another remark about the essence of the creative result. It is always not only original, not repeating the past, but it is also necessarily socially significant. It is not so important whether it is an aesthetic, scientific, technical or other field of activity; It is important that this novelty be recognized as valuable by experts in a particular field of activity. True, in everyday speech, especially - in journalism it was somehow preached to use different words (most of all - evaluative epithets) thoughtlessly, “at random”, if only it were poorer and more significant. It turns out both the “greatest”, and “the most delicious”, and “native

honor. Before our eyes, ugly phrases like “the author of a goal”, “finished start” (and “start finish”), “contact phone” (as if “contactless phones”) and the masses of such tasteless non-lepers were born and live. Once they were all undoubtedly new. But the damage they cause to language and common sense can only be called "creativity" in quotes.

Especially often it is customary to talk about children's language creation. And here the solution is not so easy. On the one hand, the child learns the native language in communication with relatives and friends - there is simply no place for the child to get another language material. On the other hand, as scientists write, the process of creativity falls into several stages: preparation for the creative act (accumulation of knowledge in the field of human interests, analysis of available facts); then - maturation, which is characterized primarily by a critical attitude to previous ideas about something. The third stage is insight, that is, the seeming sudden discretion of the possibility of rebuilding, remaking the previously existing and generally accepted judgment, construction, phenomenon, or method of studying and describing it. The fourth stage is testing a new result for truth, efficiency, value and significance. True, it must be admitted that there are in the history of creativity ingenious self-taught artists who “reach everything themselves,” without the usual stage of accumulation of previously acquired knowledge. Here children's creativity is the closest to their creative results. In fact, if the word-making of professional poets is the result of a fully conscious desire for novelty based on the accumulated knowledge of the language (V. Mayakovsky, I. Severyanin, etc.), then the child invents words and phrases that did not exist before him because of his ignorance of how to speak, and how not. Even closer to children's word creation is the forced “creativity” of newcomers in a foreign language. Recently, the English learners of the Russian language said: “ I will go to examine my tooth today, otherwise it has become quite sick”; “- You said that you had already thought about this problem. But I was thinking about this problem more than once, but two and three . ” In the first case, instead of “check”, “examine”, the Russian word of the same root as English was used, but only in its English meaning. In the second case, the Russian word “deliberate” was heard, but understood,

like two. Can this be considered creativity? We are not sure. We are sure even that such novelty cannot be assessed as socially significant, worthy of encouragement.

When a child says “namakaranilsya”, “these butterflies are the same than others”, “roll” (paddle), “Mom put the cake in the oven and it is big there” (increases in size), it is very interesting, cute, admirable ( one has to find suitable morphemes - in meaning and form, almost instantly!). But is it creativity? It seems that the final answer to this question is still ahead. It is necessary, for example, to collect a very large amount of material on children's word-formation in different languages, compare it and find out if there are literal multilingual analogies, and if there are not extensive interlanguage coincidences. In other words: are there any patterns common to all children in one or another type of innovative word formations? Only after that it will be possible to give an answer about the degree of individuality and the degree of creativity in this process.

As for the assessment of any act of speech as a creative one, such an assessment, in our opinion, is completely inappropriate. After all, a completely new scientific judgment of the type: “The Earth Revolves Around the Sun” is built on the same model as the outdated “The Sun revolves around the Earth.” The new here is in a new way of reflected reality, and not in linguistic form; the change of the same words in the positions of the subject and indirect addition is not a creative act. Apparently, language-creation, if it does not always imply the invention of new words, then new syntagmatic connections and new contexts for well-known words are obligatory for poetic, for writing skills.