Language Creativity and Co-emergence of Form and Meaning in Creative Writing Tasks

Drawing on various theoretical approaches to creativity and the emergentist perspectives, this study examines the opportunities for creative language use and emergence of complex language in creative writing tasks with high formal constraints (acrostics) and those with looser formal constraints (similes). It indicates that formal constraints lead to complex and creative language use, transforming familiar utterances into unfamiliar ones, shaping and reshaping learners’ language syntactically and lexically, paradigmatically, and syntagmatically. Despite working with the same peer, students in the acrostic task have more opportunities for standing ‘a head taller’ than themselves (Vygotsky 1978), stretching and transforming their linguistic and conceptual world. The study suggests that for learners’ language to develop in complexity, conditions need to be set, requiring them to access the L2 directly to construct new ideas and that opportunities are needed for both L2 forms and meaning to co-evolve.