Learning formulaic creativity: Chunking in verbal art and speech

Abstract The chunking problem is central to linguistics, semiotics, and poetics: How do we learn to organize a language into patterns and to use those patterns creatively? Linguistics has mainly offered two answers, one based on rule inference through innate capacities for processing and the other based on usage and on outstanding capacities for memory and retrieval. Both views are based on induction and compositionality. The Parry–Lord theory of oral composition-in-performance has argued that oral singers produce complex poems out of rehearsed improvisation through the mastery of a system of formulas, chunks that integrate phrasal, metrical, and semantic structures. The framework of formulaic creativity proposed here argues that the cognitive study of oral poetics can provide crucial insights into the chunking problem. I show the major connections between Parry–Lord and usage-based cognitive linguistics, mainly Construction Grammar and Frame Semantics. However, these approaches still remain compositional and thus struggle to model creativity and learning in oral poetry and everyday speech. The alternative is to explore a model of formulaic creativity not based on compositional patterns, but on wide learning for connecting discriminative perceptual features directly to semantic contrasts within a complex dynamic system, without the intermediation of a set of discrete units.