The human mind is capable of creativity and innovation unparalleled by any other species. At the same time, human beings elaborate and preserve complex and highly-stable traditions, transmitting them over very long time spans by means of the spoken word and through a variety of technologies, such as writing. How does human cognition give rise to such complex manifestations as oral poetic performance, and how are they affected by the introduction of writing? ORFORCREA investigated the cognitive basis of creativity in verbal art, examining its interplay with both oral tradition and literacy.
At a more general level, ORFORCREA aimed to contribute to establishing the new interdisciplinary field of cognitive oral poetics. At the risk of jumping ahead, I will say that this task has been fully achieved: my research became the only one among other existing publications in the field that builds on living traditions and uses only empirical data, something that is much needed not only in cognitive poetics but also in cognitive linguistics in general.
In order to tackle this issue, the following objectives were defined:
(1)To model the main form-meaning pairing procedures underlying formulaic patterns in poetic transitional texts from oral traditions.
(2)To draw the main theoretical and methodological implications for the general study of language and cognition, in particular for construction grammar, frame semantics, and conceptual scripts and schemas.
(3)To understand the interplay of innovation and tradition in the linguistic usage evidenced by transitional texts. In particular, what are the cross-cultural creative strategies of oral singers for coining novel expressions, based on traditional formulas or on linguistic materials from outside the tradition?
(4)To establish the semantic, functional, and cognitive differences in the frequency and use of formulaic language, between transitional texts and fully-oral texts as well as within different degrees in the use of written techniques in transitional texts.
(5) To develop new methods for studying oral traditions, especially at their transitional stage: the ER will combine combining approaches and techniques from literary studies, cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics.
(6) To analyze how factors other than oral/written produce variation in traditional formulaic language use: genre requirements, performance content&style, or cultural differences.
Importance for society: ORFORCREA is a theoretical project that does not have an obvious and direct impact on the society. However, in the course of implementing my project, I was able to achieve results that are of value to society: for instance, through organising dissemination events I demonstrated to the society (and also research community) the importance of safeguarding our cultural heritage both for societal and research needs. In addition, through the same dissemination events I was also able to talk to general public (including schoolchildren) about the meaning of creativity, the role it plays in our lives, as well as how creativity is linked to orality and literacy.
