Summarise the main points of your chosen reading and evaluate, with reference to other material in the course so far, the extent to which it helps you understand how to identify creativity in everyday language.

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Summarise the main points of your chosen reading and evaluate, with reference to other material in the course so far, the extent to which it helps you understand how to identify creativity in everyday language.

Selected Reading: Reading B - Guy Cook ‘Why play with language?’

Maybin and Swann (2006) describe language creativity as comprising not only of ‘textual artistry’ (p.1) but also the ways in which we employ language to form our individuality and manage our interactions with others.  Within this assignment I shall evaluate the points raised by Guy Cook (2006) in Reading B ‘Why play with language?’ in conjunction with other source material to determine the extent to which it helps us to identify creativity in everyday language. In one sense it useful to view Cook’s reading as part of a jigsaw, made up of individual pieces which must be connected with other pieces (or in this case theories), in order to fully appreciate its meaning and value.  Cook’s primary focus is language-play. Ranging from the triviality of children’s rhymes to serious political rhetoric, he examines how it can bring creativity and flexibility to everyday language.      

The first section of the reading explains that language originates from the need or desire to communicate information.  For Cook, Robin Dunbar’s ‘There’s a bison down by the lake’ theory (2006, p.37) exemplifies the importance of language to pre-historic man, enabling him to communicate the location of his prey and enlist support in the hunt.  Cook identifies that whilst information-orientated language still exists today, the source of this information e.g. libraries, the internet etc. are longer-lasting, providing us with ‘humanity’s accumulated knowledge of the social and natural world’ (2006, p.38).  

However, Cook also recognises that this understanding of information-orientated language is not always appropriate.  Children he states can appear unaware of its ability to be genuine or factual.  Cook describes language use by children as primarily imaginary and nonsensical.  He refers to their fondness for rhymes, preferring sound over meaning e.g. ‘geezer’, ‘squeezer’(2006, p.38) and citing their irregular grammar and use of repetition as examples of literary devices and thus creativity in everyday language.  Through this reference to children’s language or ‘lore’ (2006, p.38) Cook signposts the research of Iona and Peter Opie who in 1959 observed the conversations of 5000 school children concluding their language to be ‘artful’ (2006, p.158). This was also the finding of Roland Macaulay who identified a ‘thriving oral culture’ (1994, p.195) demonstrated through children’s use of repetition, sound, meter and rhythm.  

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Cook’s viewpoint is also supported by Roland Carter who through his study of the CANCODE Corpus (2006, p.29) identify three models, ‘inherency’, ‘sociocultural’ and ‘cognitive’ which draw a link between everyday creativity through the use of puns, repetition and echoing in verbal language, and literature (2006, p.8).  Perhaps however where Carter most corroborates Cook’s findings is in acknowledging that language play can be used for ‘humorous purposes’ and act in part ‘to bring people closer together’ (2006, p.34).  Whilst Cook agrees that children’s play can serve as a bonding mechanism he goes further in claiming that there is a ...

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