Language play as a strategy for revealing the potential of linguistic creativity
Authors: Kalashnikova L.V. 
Published: September 2024

The article discusses the results of the study of the language play phenomenon as a special linguistic creativity form. The realization of play strategies in the work-nonsense, aimed at activating the potential of linguistic creativity thinking in the decision-making process in a situation of linguistic and cognitive deficit, can lead to original ideas and unique solutions. The assumption that language play is a powerful stimulus for the development of creative thinking and the development of a variety of information processing algorithms confirms the relevance of the study. Creative thinking generates unique, new and unusual ideas, original solutions that have not taken place in the previous experience of an individual in the realization of his communicative and cognitive needs. The article focuses on two types of thinking that are used in decision-making: convergent and divergent thinking. The issues related to the application of these types of thinking in certain problem situations, the possibility of teaching a child to think outside the box, the development of methods aimed at the development of divergent thinking, as well as the correlation between divergent thinking, creative thinking and imagination, are very interesting, ambiguous and remain unsolved today. Taking into account the fact that divergent thinking is the basis for creative thinking, the author holds the view that divergent thinking and creative thinking are not identical. Linguistic anomalies, manifested at all linguistic levels and revealing the potential of the linguistic system, were investigated. Children acquire language creatively, i.e. the lack of knowledge is compensated by imagination and fantasy, the ability to stay in their metaphorical reality, allowing them to create new words without any special effort. Verbal creativity is manifested in conscious modeling, various kinds of modifications, choice of non-standard language code, in the ability to establish flexible associative links between incompatible objects, to give new meanings and so on. In the process of linguistic and stylistic analysis in the fragment under study, numerous emphatic and parallel constructions, exclamatory sentences, rhetorical repetitions, structural modifications, and inversion were revealed. It is established that free meanings of words and word combinations are easily involved in the language play, generating linguistic ambiguity at different levels. Language play is represented by playing with the meanings of polysemantic words, meanings obtained as a result of metonymic transfer, polysemy and broad meaning, in particular, the use of verbs, the meanings of which are characterized by a wide denotative reference and contextual conditionality, multiple cases of homonymy, playing with the meanings of idioms. The collision of figurative and direct meanings leads to the realization of the semantic ambiguity of a linguistic sign and to the play of the two-dimensional nature of its perception. The identified types of language play are considered as a way to actualize linguistic creativity.