On the creative aspect of language use: challenges to the generativist approach

This paper offers a critical examination of Chomsky’s perspective on the Creative Aspect of Language Use, challenging the notion that syntax alone suffices to explain the full spectrum of creative language use. While Chomsky posits syntax as the primary source of linguistic creativity, this study contends that both semantics and pragmatics are equally fundamental sources of linguistic creativity, producing new meanings and valuable representations, that syntax alone cannot account for. We first argue that syntax provides skeletal information about the hierarchical representation of syntactic constituents in a sentence but does not convey any semantic content. It is through semantic composition that syntactic structures gain meaningful content. Second, we posit that semantics dynamically generates a multiple array of meanings from a single syntactic structure, based on context. Finally, we contend that pragmatics generates meanings that extend beyond the literal interpretation of sentences, enabling speakers and listeners to convey information that is not explicitly encoded in the utterances at the syntactic and semantic levels. Together, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics synergistically contribute to the full spectrum of human language creativity, surpassing the limitations of a syntactocentric perspective.