Cognitive Semantics : Meaning and Cognition

186 JORDAN ZLATEV
often referred to as “the creativity of language” owing to the writings of
Chomsky, who in the following characteristic passage brings up this feature
and uses it as a weapon against theories that make recourse to some notion of
“similarity” in explaining novel usage.
The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the
‘creativity of language´, that is, the speaker’s ability to produce new sentences
that are immediately understood by other speakers although they bear no
physical resemblance to sentences which are ‘familiar’. (Chomsky 1971 :8)
In the onslaught on behaviorism mentioned earlier, Chomsky is somewhat
more explicit in his criticism, arguing for the necessity of a generative grammar
as (part of) an explanation of “creativity”:
It is easy to show that the new events that we accept and understand as
sentences are not related to those with which we are familiar by any simple
notion of formal (or semantic or statistical) similarity or identity of grammatical
frame. Talk of generalization is entirely pointless and empty. It appears
that we recognize a new item as a sentence not because it matches a familiar
item in any simple way, but because it matches the grammar that each
individual has somehow and in some form internalized. (Chomsky 1959 :56).
However, a generative grammar cannot in principle account for the understanding
and producing of novel expressions since it is simply a syntactic
calculus with recursive functions: a technical device that can at most separate
the “grammatical” from the “ungrammatical sentences” and associate the first
with syntactic analysis (and in more recent versions “logical form”). This
makes Chomsky even less convincing when he in an off-hand way dismisses
any appeal to similarity and generalization in the quotations above.
A generative grammar can of course be complemented with a compositional
semantic theory where the basic idea is that the meaning of the composite
expression is a function of the meaning of the parts and their means of
combination. Once we know the “meanings” of the words in a sentence,
disregarding whether it is new or not, all we need to do is to combine them
according to semantic rules that are parallel to the syntactic rules in order to
derive the meaning of the sentence, i.e. “understand” it. Working out the
details of such “a theory of meaning” has been a major task in more (formal)
semantically oriented linguistics and analytical philosophy, often under the
motto of “meaning-as-truth-conditions”.
However, the compositional approach to explaining creativity has serious
problems and below I list some of the foremost while I omit discussion