On the Creative Use of Language: The Form of Lexical Resources

We introduce the problem of referential creativity: how it is that a person can give a word or phrase a new denotation even though she has never heard or used in that way before. Using real examples that we have collected, we focus on the case of semantic type coercion, where a phrase of a given type is used in a textual context that requires a completely different type yet the intended message is perfectly well understood. We frame our account as the problem of what form the linguistic resources available to a speaker must have such that she can appreciate the opportunity for creative phrasings. What systematic relationships exist in the speaker's lexicon that enable a phrase to convey something quite different than it normally would, and why tshould his ever occur during the generation process? We draw on a new theory of how information is associated with a wor6-Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon--and we embed our account in a theory of generation as an incremental process that makes use of a rich model of the situation in which the utterance occurs.