Linguistic creativity in cinematic discourse and discourse of children's literature: lexical level

The research aims to develop the method of contrastive analysis of linguistic creativity in discourse. The present study attracting two typologically different discourses, the cinematic discourse and the discourse of children's literature, demonstrates the 5-stage algorithm of contrastive frequency and contingency analysis of linguistic creativityparameters in all language levels, phonological, morphological, word building, lexical, syntactic and graphic. The algorithm helps distinguish between discourse creative and non-creative use of linguistic means, with the basic criterion of pragmatic relevance serving to make the decision between the two. The procedure is applied to the discourse data sets which amount to 104,543 text signs of two cinematic comedies and four children's humorous short stories; to assess the pragmatic relevance of linguistic creativity parameters, we relied on the humorous effect produced with the use of linguistic means. The main research focus of the study is the parametric activity and parametric distribution within the lexical level of the discourses contrasted. Apart from the general parametric results contrasting all the parameters of linguistic creativity within the lexical level, we present the results of two distinct parameters, socio-communicative register shifts and professional code shifts, which clearly specify the differences in their discourse creative and non-creative use in the cinematic discourse and the discourse of children's literature. The results show that enhanced general parametric activity is not contingent with discourse creative parametric activity as the pragmatically relevant modifications of parameter use display diversity in two discourse types. The developed method of contrastive analysis and the results obtained will stimulate further research in cross-discourse studies of linguistic creativity, which might disclose new dimensions in discourse construal and discourse productivity.