Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T21:11:28.242Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Language and creativity: The art of common talk

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 March 2007

R. Keith Sawyer
R. Keith Sawyer
Affiliation:
Education, Washington University, St. Louis, MO 63130, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Ronald Carter, Language and creativity: The art of common talk. London: Routledge, 2004. Pp. xiii, 255. Hb $99.95, Pb $29.95.

The central idea of Carter's wonderful new book is that “Creativity is a pervasive feature of spoken language … a key component in interpersonal communication, and … is a property actively possessed by all speakers and listeners” (p. 6). Carter is a scholar with a long history of solid work, both as one of the leaders of the CANCODE corpus effort (the Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English), and as the author of two books on English grammar (Carter, Hughes, & McCarthy, 2000; Carter & McCarthy, 2006). During countless hours reviewing transcripts from the CANCODE corpus of spoken English (5 million words, collected between 1993 and 2001), he repeatedly noticed that “patterns and forms of language which as a student of literature I had readily classified as poetic or literary can be seen to be regularly occurring in everyday conversational exchanges” (10).

Type
BOOK REVIEWS
Information
Language in Society , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , April 2007 , pp. 270 - 274
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). The problem of speech genres. In his Speech genres and other late essays, 60–102. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Becker, A. L. (1995). Beyond translation: Essays towards a modern philology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.CrossRef
Carter, R.; Hughes, R.; & McCarthy, M. (2000). Exploring grammar in context. New York: Cambridge.
Carter, R., & McCarthy, M. (2006). Cambridge grammar of English: A comprehensive guide. New York: Cambridge.
Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
Gumperz, J. J. (1982). Discourse strategies. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRef
Jakobson, R. (1960). Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics. In T. A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in language, 350–77). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rampton, B. (1995). Crossing: Language and ethnicity among adolescents. Harlow: Longman.
Sawyer, R. K. (2001). Creating conversations: Improvisation in everyday discourse. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton.
Sawyer, R. K. (2003a). Group creativity: Music, theater, collaboration. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Sawyer, R. K. (2003b). Improvised dialogues: Emergence and creativity in conversation. Westport, CT: Greenwood.
Sawyer, R. K. (2006). Explaining creativity: The science of human innovation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Silverstein, M. (1984). On the pragmatic “poetry” of prose: Parallelism, repetition, and cohesive structure in the time course of dyadic conversation. In D. Schiffrin (ed.), Meaning, form, and use in context: Linguistic applications, 181–98. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Tannen, D. (1989). Talking voices: Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse. New York: Cambridge University Press.