School of Education and Languages

Assignment Form

Name of student: Chan Ka Sin, Aska

Student no.: 11864354

Course: GEN E243F

Name of tutor: Dr Peter Storey

Assignment no. TMA 2

Date of submission: 24/4/2018

Overall score: ____________/100

Comments:

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There are many examples of different kinds of creativity which had been used

in both written and spoken English in our everyday life.

One of the examples appeared in lecture 11’s tutorial notes. Lecture covered

the knowledge about the theoretical bases of everyday creativity, including

textual theories and socio-cultural theories, and in the category of textual

theories, there are pattern forming as well as pattern reforming. Both pattern

forming and pattern reforming involve repetition, unconsciously forming

patterns of words and phrases, by repeating words or phrases another speaker

has used. When this happens across turns and speakers, NOT within one

speaker’s turn, it is known as pattern forming. I don't really agree that pattern
forming is a kind of creativity as it has a limitation which is, pattern forming is

not consciously done, so the listeners or even the speakers themselves might not

noticed as well, which means pattern forming doesn't have meaning at all. It is

less overt than pattern re-forming and quite unconscious, but it also does offer a

little bit aids to reinforce relationships between speakers ( Carter, R.). However,

when it comes to consciousness, there is a main difference between pattern

forming and pattern reforming. Pattern forming is done unconsciously while

pattern reforming is a trick of playing of words which is done consciously as

well as deliberately, such as puns, playful reformulation of idioms. From the

tutorial worksheet of lecture 11, Ned: Claire has darned dish towels

Frank: Her mother did it. Sure.

Lydia: Well see I said if you grew up in a house where your mother

(patched washcloths).

Ned: (Remember darning, Sherry?) Well, it’s when you don’t want to say

damn dish towels.(General laughter) Don’t you call that process darning? From

the above conservations, we can see that there is a pattern reforming as well as

pattern forming, Ned is intentionally to make fun with the words which were

said by himself before. We can see that it includes a repetition of established

patterns and Nad is playing with the word ‘Darned’ and ‘Damned’ which makes

his friends laughed and hence, reinforce their relationships.

Other than pattern forming and pattern reforming, there are also other kinds of

examples of theoretical bases of everyday creativity, such as the one we are

going to discuss-- Reported speech. From the extract in the tutorial worksheet of

lecture 11, Reported speech. Use of reported speech in everyday talk is creative,

when applying reported speech in the both conversations and articles, the

meaning of someone else’s words are being placed in the new context which, to

be more specific, the meaning is being changed. According to Maybin (A

particularly rich way of making intertextual links, 2006), there is a scale of

reporting in different forms, form explicit reporting to hybrid forms and finally,

reach a complete appropriation. There are many functions of reported speech,

such as giving suggestions or even apologising. From the exact in lecture 11’s

tutorial worksheet, the example of ‘ Eating on the New York Thruway’ , the

reported speech used in the example plays a role of dialogizing the words and

the speaker adds her own interpretation to the words in a hybrid forms, which

the speaker did some subtle double-voicing through her tone of voice.

Reproducing others’ voices often occurs at the climax of a conversation, it helps

the speaker to share his or her own imaginations or little things that are in their

minds, according to Tannen, reported speech is like an abstraction which hardly

have a basis in reality, and after using reporting speech, the listener would be

captured immediately as it creates a sense of immediacy, nevertheless, the

listener can have the shared sense making from the things that have happened

on them before. Personally, I do agree that reported speech is a good way to

show our creativity in everyday English as it does not only help us to transform

something abstract to something valid, but it also help us to show our own
opinions about the words, nevertheless, it also helps to letting other people to

know the speakers do equip and grasp different skills of managing using

different kinds of tenses and grammars.

Apart from those theoretical bases of the creativity of English in our everyday

life which have been discussed above, there are way too many things we can

keep discussing about and one of them is the cline of literariness. Literary

language is not only found in literature, it can also be found in everyday English

such as news report or poem. According to the article written by Jones, 2010,

Cater argues that the features which could be counted as creativity in everyday

English like word play, rhyme, metaphor are serving an important social

functions. However, the literary Ines is mostly be seen as cline and it is more

likely associated with the interactions between friends and helps to build

solidarity. Personally I do agree on part of his point of view as I do think literary

language does somehow help people build up their to those around them as

being creative in your everyday language could help to capture others’ attention

and which help to build up a strong bonding between the speakers and the

listeners. However, I disagree that literalness merely serve the social purpose as

it will also focused on the basic principles of being creative while using

everyday English such a as the poem ‘Unknown’ which is written by Hart

Seeky, although it seems to use as a poem to expression the poet’s emotions,

which could be considered as a way the writer is trying to around others’

interests, but it also uses lots of creative language features such as repetition and
the whole poem can serve several poetic functions which proved that

literariness is not only for social goals merely, and personally I think it is quite

creative.

All in all, there are different theoretical bases of everyday creativity, including

textual theories and socio-cultural theories, though maybe not every single one

of us can come to a consensus on how creative every single one theory is, but I

think it is good for us to discuss as it provides us a greater chance to

communicate and hence, we may discover some new perspective about those

theories.

References:

1. Jones, R. H. (2010) Creativity and Discourse World Englishes Vol. 29(4)

pp. 467-480.

2. Carter, R. (1999) Common language: Corpus, creativity and cognition,

Language and Literature, Vol 8(3): 195–216

3. Tannen, D. (1989) Talking Voices: Repetition, dialogue and imagery in

conversational discourse, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.