The Meanings of the Concepts of Creativity and Being Creative in Everyday Language

Creative and creativity as abstract concepts are hard to define and they have different meanings in scientific studies and everyday language. This study investigated the meanings of the Turkish terms "yaratici" (creative) and "yaraticilik" (creativity) in everyday language by using the data from social media. The study aims to reveal the meanings of the terms creative and creativity by using Big Data methods, corpus linguistic approaches, and prototype theories. The Turkish data were collected from Twitter between February 2018 and March 2019 using Rich Site Summary (RSS) and Application Programming Interface (API) without duplicates, retweets, or replies. In this way, 40,382 tweets containing yaratici and 13,007 tweets containing yaraticilik were obtained. The yaratici data consisted of 124,028 types and 828,661 tokens whereas the yaraticilik data consisted of 57,448 types and 268,886 tokens. With the help of Antconc and Lancbox software and statistical analyses such as frequency, log frequency, MI, DeltaP and G, the results showed that the meanings of yaratici and yaraticilik in everday Turkish and in dictionaries and scientific texts did not overlap. For example, the words such as intelligence, thinking, thoughts, and imagination could all be seen in the dictionaries and significantly in the data. But the word "kreatif," which is used in the dictionary entries for yaratici, was not significantly used in the data. Instead, #creativity was used significantly frequently for yaraticilik in the data. Moreover, phrases such as using various solutions and divergent thinking could be both seen in the scientific definitions and significantly frequently in the data. But phrases such as solving problems and motivation, which are used in the scientific definitions, were used rarely in the data. Therefore, when updated, the dictionaries shoud benefit from the uses of these terms in everyday life, the scientific texts should underline to what extent the definitions differ from everyday language, and research should be conducted by taking into account these differences.