Introduction

Creativity and innovation appear in many different guises and on various levels of language, including sound, form, meaning and use. Instead of asking for Cheerios or cereal for breakfast, for example, my daughter blended them together and asked for Cheerial; when talking to some friends from a different region in the United States, my husband asked y'all want to join us? (rather than his own typical form you want to join us?); when describing a person who lived in our neighborhood, my son once coined the term back door neighbor to complement the term next door neighbor.

Linguistic creativity and innovation abound (even outside of my own immediate family!). For example, a speaker may know exactly about whom s/he is thinking when beginning a story about a specific person. But s/he may need to create a way to describe that person to an addressee that is more informative than the pronoun she, e.g. through a descriptive clause such as she– y'know that woman that I met when I went with Laura, last weekend, to that festival at Glen Echo? that actually tells a mini-story. And although we all have routine ways of asking for the salt (Can you pass the salt? or Salt, please), we may also vary our requests by saying This food is really bland or Are we out of salt?