Constructions and creativity

The first principle of cognitive linguistics is to look for the origins of linguistic powers in robust mental operations not specific to language. For millennia, language science has assumed that human beings possess mental operations for unifying, combining, and merging patterns to create expressions, and that, conversely, they can analyze expressions they encounter to recognize patterns that were combined to produce them. The third section of this article reviews some of the literature concerned with these powers to combine patterns into expressions and to analyze expressions into patterns that were blended to create them. Any assumption about such a linguistic power takes out a loan on theory that must be cashed out with a non-language-specific explanation if the theory is to count as cognitive. One can stipulate to the existence of some unexplained power that is needed for linguistic performance, but that stipulation is insubstantial until it is grounded in a demonstrated non-language-specific operation. An assumption or stipulation about a linguistic power is cashed out when we locate and model the non-language-specific cognitive operations that make that linguistic power possible. The first section of this article presents the proposition that the non-language-specific mental operation that accounts for these linguistic powers is blending, otherwise known as conceptual integration. The second section provides a topical review of blending in specific communicative form-meaning pairs and their combination. Blending is the foundation of creativity in communication, or, more specifically, in the creation and combining of form-meaning pairs, also called “constructions.”