Cognitive approaches to linguistic creativity

[to appear in: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Cognitive Linguistics] Humans are an incredibly creative species – our minds have evolved to a degree that has enabled us to think original thoughts and come up with novel solutions to a great number of problems. One domain of human cognition that has recently received considerable attention in cognitive linguistics is linguistic creativity. Over the past couple of years, several publications have contributed new and interesting cognitive linguistic findings on the topic. This paper gives an overview of creativity research from the fields of linguistics and psychology and shows how these findings are relevant for cognitive approaches to linguistic creativity. A particular focus will be on Glăveanu’s (2013) 5A framework of creativity, which offers the most comprehensive model of creativity and takes into account the various aspects that interact in any creative act (actors, audience, artefacts, actions and affordances). Next, the cognitive framework in which most linguistic creativity research is currently being carried out in, Construction Grammar (Goldberg 2019; Hilpert 2019; Hoffmann 2022b) will be discussed. After summarizing the results from constructionist research on verbal creativity, a constructionist model of Glăveanu’s framework will be presented – the ‘5C model’ of constructional creativity (constructors, co-constructors, constructs, constructional blending and the constructional network). This model will detail the role of constructional networks (Diessel 2019) in creative acts and it will be argued that Conceptual Blending (Turner 2018, 2020) is the domain-general cognitive process that creates creative (as well as non-creative) constructs.