Are Children Linguistically Creative or Conservative?

ABSTRACT In our research on the emergence of grammar, we identified a property that receives less attention in acquisitional studies and that seems unknown to the general population that deals with and delights in children’s utterances. This property concerns the conservative attitude observed in their production, which, in general, is characterized as creative. This excerpt from our research, in a sociocognitive (or use-based) perspective aligned with cognitive-functional linguistics, aims to reflect on conservatism and creativity, observed in the statements of the little ones. To this end, we mobilize studies that conceptualize and analyze them. In order to exemplify the phenomena under discussion in the language in use, we selected two scenes from our corpus of parental diary videos in Brazilian Portuguese, published on a social network. The evidence found in the literature and in the scenes analyzed indicate that there is a human tendency to conservatism that ends up highlighting creative occurrences in the use of language.