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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, ksawyer@wustl.edu
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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

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References

REFERENCES

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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.
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