One byte short of a full fruit : a sociocultural approach to linguistic creativity

This squib adopts a sociocultural perspective on linguistic creativity, challenging the traditional view of creative expressions as a purely internal cognitive process. Instead, it frames creativity as a collaborative achievement situated within the dynamic interaction between speakers and hearers, shaped by a complex interplay of pragmatic and social factors. To illustrate this, the study analyses the constructional idiom [X short of Y], a template traditionally used to signal mental inadequacy or eccentricity (e.g., a few sandwiches short of a picnic or a few bricks short of a full deck ). By examining diverse examples extracted from the enTenTen21 corpus (Sketch Engine), the squib shows that speakers do not merely replicate fixed idioms but strategically innovate within the constructional frame to generate context-sensitive meaning. Two main drivers of this creativity are explored: first, the reliance on shared cultural encyclopedic knowledge to ensure successful metaphorical mapping against the mechanism of coercion; and second, the associative networks in the explanation of metonymical or metaphorical mappings, resulting in the reward of the hearer’s inferential effort. Ultimately, this squib argues that linguistic creativity is a fundamentally interactive phenomenon, where the playful modification of existing constructional idioms serves both communicative effectiveness or appropriateness and social alignment.