Innovation, language, and grey literature

Language and innovation are inseparable. Language conveys ideas which are essential in innovation, establishes the most immediate connections with our conceptualisation of the outside world, and provides the building blocks for communication. Every linguistic choice is necessarily meaningful, and it involves the parallel construction of form and meaning. From this perspective, language is a dynamic knowledge construction process. In this article, emphasis will be laid on investigating how words are used to describe innovation, and how innovation topics can influence word usage and collocational behaviour. Especially in grey materials, and in a context-based approach, the lexical representation of innovative knowledge is closely related to the representation of knowledge itself, and gives the opportunity to reduce the gap between knowledge representation and knowledge understanding. This will bring into focus the dynamic interplay between lexical creativity and innovative pragmatic contexts, and the necessity for a dynamic semantic shift from context-driven vagueness to domain-driven specialisation.