Blog CRC1646

The international workshop Linguistic Creativity in Generative Grammar addressed the question of how linguistic creativity that goes beyond productivity can be addressed in generative grammar frameworks, and especially in what ways analogy can be modelled in such a framework. It featured different presentations from the projects A01 and A04.

In their talk, András Bárány & Jutta M. Hartmann (A01) explored the Role of Analogy in Generative Grammar as a creative cognitive process. In this context, various cross-linguistic phenomena were presented that are ungrammatical under standard theoretical assumptions, but are nevertheless documented and are superficially or structurally similar to a different, productive construction. The contribution by Fabian Zöfelt (A01) dealt with complement-like wenn-clauses in German. He investigated whether or not these can be analysed as complements or adjuncts and how the results of his experiment on long-distance extractions from wenn-clauses could be derived. Szilvia Daczó (A01) presented new data from an experiment and corpus research showing that speakers of Hungarian not only use long-distance agreement with transitive matrix verbs, but also with intransitive ones. She focused in particular on the role of analogical reasoning and discussed this against the background of theoretical assumptions such as Maximise Minimal Means. The talks by Szilvia Daczó and Fabian Zöfelt were commented on by Anke Himmelreich. Ralf Vogel & Jana Häussler (A04) showed in their presentation that mental grammar contains gaps and conflicts that need to be resolved through creativity, using various German phenomena as examples. They described this linguistic ability as Grammar Creation Competence.

The workshop was rounded off by a panel session, addressing the research topics of analogy in Generative Grammar in A01, with additional more general perspectives such as first and second language acquisition and actual morphosyntactic errors in the context of intra- and inter-speaker creativity.

The workshop preceeded the Bielefeld Leiden Comparative Syntax Conference 2025 (BieLeiCos2025) which was organized by Szilvia Daczó, Jutta M. Hartmann, Anke Himmelreich and Fabian Zöfelt (all of A01), Shravani Patil (A03) and Mary Amaechi.

For more information on Projects A01, A03, A04

For more information on BieLeiCos2025 see here.

Fotos: © Sascha Hermannski und András Bárány.