The chapter locates the Minimalist Program (MP) in the wider context of the Generative Program (GP). It argues that MP is the next logical step for GP to take given the relative success of two prior projects: (i) explaining how linguistic creativity (the capacity to use and understand an unbounded number of different hierarchically organized linguistic objects) is possible and (ii) explaining how linguistic flexibility (the human meta-capacity to acquire the grammatical recursive procedures that undergird linguistic creativity) is possible. The argument is that given that we (roughly) understand what kinds of recursive procedures natural language grammars (Gs) contain, and given that we (roughly) understand key aspects of the fine structure of the faculty of language (FL), MP asks the obvious next question of why FL has the particular structure it has.

In this book, we have explored the view that there is ample empirical evidence to suggest that the full range of mental grammatical knowledge, from morphemes to abstract syntactic patterns, can best be described as constructions. We have seen that Construction Grammar can explain how children acquire English and that it provides a cognitively plausible account of the synchronic variation of Englishes across the globe as well as the diachronic changes that affected the English language over the centuries. In this final chapter, I will show you how we can bring together everything that we have learnt so far to analyse authentic constructs. As you know, outside of textbooks, constructs are often going to be fairly complex and will involve the activation of a multitude of constructions. I will, therefore, introduce you to a representation system (Constructional Approach to Syntactic Analysis; Herbst and Hoffmann 2018) that allows us to illustrate the various constructions that combine to produce complex utterances. Then, I will conclude the book by briefly discussing some phenomena that I, personally, think are currently emerging as ‘hot topics’ in constructionist research.

Our research pursues an answer to the question of the influence of the general creative potential upon the creative performance in coining and interpreting new complex words. This chapter presents fundamental views, theories, and principles of the concept of creativity and because creative potential has been studied and evaluated by various psychological methods, we provide a general overview of various aspects of approaches to creativity from the psychological point of view. Attention is devoted to various methods used for the study and evaluation of creativity. Special focus is on the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking because it is crucial to our research. This is followed by a critical overview of various approaches to the concept of linguistic creativity, and more specifically, to word-formation and word-interpretation creativity. This chapter introduces our approach that relies on (i) an onomasiological theory of word-formation (ii) an onomasiological theory of meaning predictability, and (iii) a theory of competition in word-formation and word-interpretation.