Creativity, Playfulness and Linguistic Carnivalization in James Joyce’s

What is linguistic creativity?
Language literally provides us with unlimited opportunity for creativity, most notably in the 
generation of novel sentences and phrasings. From this viewpoint, it is easy to see how linguistic 
creativity corresponds with ideas put forward in several (mostly generative) linguistic paradigms, 
commonly referring to the human capacity to create an infinite number of utterances with a limited 
number of resources. Creativity is thus an aspect of ‘competence’ which is a useful notion in 
understanding how humans can consistently create unique sentences through the use of subliminally 
understood, but identifiable and empirically verifiable rules of well-formedness (or grammar).
Most people, however, would maintain that there is some line between this ‘ordinary’ type of 
creativity and, for lack of a better term, ‘artistic’ creativity. Artistic creativity seems somehow 
original and/or extraordinary, whereas the output of this Chomskyan-style creativity may or may not 
be perceived as original or extraordinary; originality/extraordinariness being beside the point – the 
operative term in this understanding is generative creativity, i.e. a generative component working 
with a limited system of tacitly-understood rules and algorithms that can potentially produce infinite 
sentences. This then means that even the seemingly most mundane sentences can be creative or even 
completely unique, regardless of whether they are ‘artistically’ felicitous, innovative or artfully 
crafted to elicit a special effect in the recipient. Though it can seem drastic to completely ignore a 
concept of artistic linguistic creativity as a discrete type of creativity (since, for example, authors are 
typically valued and for their ability to communicate fresh, insightful perceptions in well-crafted 
language) there is no simple way of differentiating these two types;
4
for example, neologisms, 
rhymes, allusions, sarcasm, irony, similes, metaphors, analogies, puns and other witticisms, 
regardless of how passively or actively they are used by any individual, are a natural part of the 
native speaker’s competence (though this competence is rarely, if ever, examined or differentiated 
from ‘ordinary’ competence within the generative framework). Everyday speakers of any language, 
4
For fuller a discussion, see Carter, R. & W. Nash. (2004). Language and Creativity: The art of common talk , 2004, p. 
53-86. 

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often unnoticed in the course of normal conversation, create new words, new meanings and 
idiosyncratic amalgams that are easily understood, although they will never make their way into 
dictionaries or usage guides. 
In addition, creativity is clearly a scalar phenomenon, which makes drawing an absolute line 
between ‘creative’ language and ‘other’ language impossible in practice. For example, exploiting the 
possibilities of unusual collocations is a typical and much oft-cited way of expressing creativity. 
Compare for example the scale of collocational creativity shown in Figure 2: