Investigating eighth-grade students’ lexical creativity in writing argumentative text in Indonesian language classroom

Linguistic creativity has been a research topic and has been studied extensively for decades in second language, foreign language, or bilingual contexts. Nonetheless, its use in formal Indonesian as an L1 classroom seems to be underresearched. Thus, this study explores students’ linguistic creativity at the lexical level in composing argumentative texts with student self-selected topics. The research included 12 eighth-grade students’ self-selected topics in argumentative texts analyzed using qualitative content analysis. In analyzing the data, linguistic creativity at the lexical level based on Zawada’s (2006) taxonomy includes formal lexical creativity, semantic lexical creativity, syntagmatic lexical choice, and paradigmatic lexical choice. The study found that the students deployed different lexical creativity strategies in the argumentative text, and the most frequent lexical creativity was formal lexical creativity, followed by paradigmatic lexical choice, semantic lexical creativity, and syntagmatic lexical. Thus, the study suggests that Indonesian eighth-grade students are quite adept at manipulating word forms, and they may benefit from expanding the use of different lexical strategies to deliver their messages, especially in building their arguments.


INTRODUCTION
Creativity, as one of the 21st-century skills, is an essential property in today's life.Its importance is highlighted by decades of research in the field (Kaufman & Sternberg, 2010), including in the language education field (Akyıldız & Çelik, 2020;Cho & Kim, 2018;Lasagabaster, 2000).Sawyer (2012) argues that creativity allows people to adapt to volatile circumstances and unpredictable life, solve real-life problems, deal with challenges better, and act effectively on the task at hand.Creativity has been assessed commonly through the use of divergent thinking by generating a solution to a problem from a given prompt, and assessment is made from the perspective of fluency, flexibility, originality (along with effectiveness), and trait of human beings (Plucker et al., 2004;Pringle, 2013).In linguistic context, Chomsky (2006, p. 6) describes it as "the distinctively human ability to express new thoughts and to understand entirely new expressions of thought, within the framework of an 'instituted language," and linguistic creativity is owned by everyone and used on a daily basis (Carter, 2004) because it is used to construct "innovative forms of expressions" based on the previously known configuration (Stawarska, 2022, p. 84).Beyond that, Simonton (2012, cited in Hoffmann, 2020) emphasizes that using creativity in specific contexts might be different.For example, in an informal situation between close friends, communicating using very formal language can be considered inappropriate, or vice versa.
Linguistic creativity can be distinguished into structural analogy, meaning using well-established linguistic rules, and lexical creativity, which involves creating new words, phrases, or expressions that lead to more fundamental changes.Even though Gay (1980) argues that creativity based on the structural analogy, in terms of analogy and metaphor, is "weak creativity" compared to lexical creativity, it is still a product of creativity.Further discussion on the separation of linguistic creativity involves the nature of the creativity process into rule-governed or rule-breaking (see López Rúa, 2010).Chomsky (2009) proposes rule-governed creativity, where the ability of the user of language combines a limited stock of linguistic elements, such as words.As the product of linguistic creativity, the language created by speakers reflects the creativity of those speakers (Zawada, 2006).Thus, the taxonomy of linguistic creativity is the point of departure for analyzing students' linguistic creativity, which consists of lexis, grammar, and discourse.In this research context, linguistic creativity at the lexical level is the foci with formal lexical creativity, semantic lexical creativity, paradigmatic lexical choice, and syntagmatic lexical choice (see Figure 1).Formal lexical creativity is the skill that is responsible for word-creation and wordformation strategies, and it works around the syntactic level.While word-creation strategies include strategies such as clipping, backformation, blending, invention, and borrowing, word-formation strategies mainly include strategies like derivation, compounding, and reduplication (Zawada, 2006, pp. 243-244), which are included in the generative lexicon as rules for productive word formation (Cruse, 1986;Szerencsi, 2010).Furthermore, Hanks (2013) highlights that the types of word-creation strategies are not usually considered part of speakers' linguistic knowledge but are instead typically attributed to the creativity of individual speakers.There are several characteristics whereby word-creation strategies represent language creativity rather than language productivity; creation strategies are often unproductive, irregular, and unpredictable.

Figure 1
Subcategories of Linguistic Creativity at Lexical Level (Zawada, 2006, pp. 243-247) To exemplify derivation formal lexical creativity in Indonesian, language users can use makan (to eat [root word]), memakan (to eat [transitive]), makanan (food [nominalized]), or dimakan (to be eaten [passive]), and by using certain affixation, the language users are in the effort to create a particular effect in their language use.It is important to note that in the formal writing context as this study, formal lexical creativity tends to follow grammatical rules, thus called rule-governed creativity (Matthews, 1991), and is considered weak linguistic creativity (Gay, 1980).Körtvélyessy et al. (2021) emphasize that a deeper psychological level plays a central function in regulating creativity in coining new words, and derivational lexical choice is found to be frequently high but is not too specific (Vallès, 2003).While formal lexical creativity deals with word formation, semantic lexical creativity refers to the changes in word meaning.Zawada (2006) argues that in semantic lexical creativity, the meaning of the compound words might be descriptive and readily understood by the language users, but it can also propose a completely different meaning.Semantic lexical creativity can also be selected as one of the approaches children use when they do not know the vocabulary they need to use in specific contexts (Löfkvist, 2014).Ofoegbu and Usar (2018) reported that semantic lexical creativity is used for stylistic reasons when language users make their messages understood by others.In the Indonesian language, for example, Ibu (mother) is extensively used to address women who are older than the speakers or writers or if they are adults and have equal status with them.Fernández-Fontecha (2021) affirms that more creative students in L2 settings deploy more wide-ranging lexical choices in semantic fluency.
When choosing the lexical items in creativity, language users can select whether they use paradigmatic or syntagmatic lexical choices.Paradigmatic lexical choice represents the choice of a speaker to choose possible lexical items that show equivalence in some sense (Mel'cuk, 1996).Generally, when someone creates utterance A instead of utterance B, this is related to the form of linguistic creativity their utterance takes.Furthermore, the choice of lexical innovation among existing words is regarded as a form of linguistic creativity.In this creative context, speakers tend to choose a lexical innovation rather than a conventional expression.For instance, in the Indonesian language, for example, a speaker can use tidur (sleep) or istirahat (take a rest).Even though the words have different meanings, both can be selected for similar activities, and istirahat can be an umbrella term for sleeping or stopping working on something.On the other hand, syntagmatic lexical choice is "the choices that speakers can make in choosing which lexical items will go together in an expression in a syntagmatic sense" (Zawada, 2006, p. 247).It connects words that usually appear together or co-occurrences; in other words, they collocate and are understandable to the readers (Bartsch, 2004;2016;Fellbaum, 2015).For instance, in Bahasa Indonesia, the words berenang (swim) and insang (gill) are predicted to emerge in a text or discourse when people discuss fish or activities in the pool but are unanticipated in the discussion of birds.These co-occurrences are expected to materialize in both spoken and written communication by the readers and listeners.However, it is regarded as creativity when the collocation is unusual.As exemplified by Zawada (2006, p. 247), using "outbreak" has a negative meaning, and when it is used to state something positive, such as "an outbreak of peace," it is considered creativity.
For decades, a large and growing body of research has investigated linguistic creativity worldwide in different contexts and foci, for example, the psychological perspective of word formation (Körtvélyessy et al., 2021), the music scene (López Rúa, 2010), humor (Aleksandrova, 2022), and educational context (Hofweber & Graham, 2017;Landry, 1974;Lasagabaster, 2000;Skalicky et al., 2017).From a psychological perspective, Körtvélyessy et al. (2021) examined word-formation among 357 undergraduate students from different faculties using the Torrance test of creative thinking.This investigation underlines the notion that the word-formation the students deployed in the text is an act of creativity rather than "a blind process" (p.1047).In a different setting, López Rúa (2010), who investigates linguistic creativity in the music scene, reports that alternative music artists creatively named themselves with different linguistic strategies such as nonmorphological deviation, for example, by changing a letter with a symbol or number, affixation, and other morphological devices like compounding, conversion, and back formation to name a few.Unlike the previous two research, Aleksandrova (2022) found that by incorporating the 3R-module, which consisted of recognizing, reproducing, and recreating, combined with 3T-stage model activities, comprising transparency, training, and testing, and tested using 3S-test (sense-finding, solution-finding, and scope-finding tasks) from pun-based jokes could assist the improvements of ideas not only in quantity but also in quality and improve the personal linguistic creativity levels.
Delving into the educational context, Landry (1974) noticed that bilingual students outperformed monolingual students in figural creativity because by having more resources for novel and diverse ideas, bilingual students seemed to possess the ability to be flexible in thinking and solving problems.In more language-focused research, Skalicky et al. (2017) reported that certain linguistic features, such as the use of lexical diversity, present tense, and word meaningfulness, emerge in the convergent thinking performance of the participants who studied at the university level from undergraduate to doctoral degrees.In a different vein, Hofweber and Graham (2017) highlight how the inclusion of literary texts for Year 9 English students who learn French and German as L2 enhances the students' literacy, motivation, and linguistic and non-linguistic creativity.The positive impact of bilingualism on students' linguistic creativity is also emphasized by Lasagabaster (2000), yet even though the conclusion needs to be taken carefully, the benefit of having the ability to speak more than one language to linguistic creativity is not immediate.In the Indonesian academic context, Ningsih et al. (2021) examined the Indonesian for foreign speaker students' linguistic creativity at the morphological, syntactic, and semantic levels from 19 essays the students produced.They found that, at the morphological level, the students inserted foreign words, deployed non-standard words, and utilized abbreviations to keep the writing flowing.At the syntactic level, the students were able to expand the subject as the most frequently occurred, then followed the expansion of adverbs, objects, and predicates.While at the semantic levels, simile and personification were the two most frequently used creativity.
Despite extensive research into linguistic creativity across different contexts, there has been scarce research on younger learners' linguistic creativity, thus seemingly overlooking one developmental stage in school years, the L1 context and the realization of lexical creativity in the formal context.As the review above shows, linguistic creativity has been explored and investigated for decades in different fields.In the educational context, most linguistic creativity research has focused on bilingual settings (Lasagabaster, 2020;Landry, 1974) or L2 settings (Hofweber & Graham, 2017;Ningsih et al., 2021).However, how linguistic creativity is delivered in students' L1 and younger learner settings remains underresearched.Thus, this research aims to bridge the gap by revealing students' use of linguistic creativity, especially at the lexical level.By providing the deployment of lexical creativity portrayal, it is hoped that this effort can enhance the students' creativity in using language to develop their writing skills can be postulated, and further educational support for the students to improve their writing, especially in the L1 context, can be offered.

METHOD
Qualitative content analysis (Elo et al., 2014) was deployed to explore the data in-depth to elicit and reveal students' linguistic creativity.It is deemed suitable for the aim of this research for three reasons.First, qualitative content analysis is a versatile research tool offering flexibility and adaptability to the data, including linguistic data.Qualitative content analysis can be used to examine different aspects of students' linguistic creativity at the lexis level, including formal and semantic lexical creativities and syntagmatic and paradigmatic lexical choices.Second, this research did not try to intervene in the students' linguistic creativity ability or teaching-learning activities and generalize the research result.The researchers deliberately did not include the teaching and learning process as the research aimed to demonstrate the extent of students' natural use of linguistic creativity in their writing.Last, using the content analysis, it was hoped that students' use of linguistic creativity patterns could be identified.By identifying the pattern of linguistic creativity, further development can be suggested in the teaching and learning process to flourish linguistic creativity, especially in the student's first language.As depicted in Figure 2, this study follows Elo et al.'s (2014) phase of qualitative content analysis with some adaptation because taking these phases can improve the trustworthiness of the data analysis.

Figure 2
Qualitative Content Analysis Phase to Improve Trustworthiness (Elo et al., 2014) This study included 12 argumentative texts composed by eighth-grade junior high school students in West Bandung Regency, Indonesia, and retrieved from the Indonesian teacher teaching them.They were asked to write argumentative texts with different themes that they selected independently.The rationale for choosing argumentative text was that the text presents strong arguments from a particular point of view as a response to the task provided to persuade readers (Deatline- Buchman & Jitendra, 2006), and they were required to demonstrate their creativity in dealing with the task.There were three reasons for purposely selecting the participants.First, they learned how to write argumentative texts in the classrooms prior to the commencement of this study.Thus, they were expected to be able to write the text and to work on the given divergent task.Second, all participants were monolingual in terms of the working language they used because they only used the Indonesian language at home and exclusively at school.As the research site is where people commonly use Preparation Phase

Reporting Phase
•Reporting results

•Reporting analysis process
Indonesian along with Sundanese, interference between the languages can presumably influence their texts.Even though they might be exposed to other languages, like local or international languages, their working language was Bahasa Indonesia.Last, they were fluent speakers and writers of Indonesian, as it was their working language, and they were formally exposed to the Indonesian language for at least eight years.
After the students had composed and submitted the argumentative text to the teachers, their identities were anonymized to protect their privacy.Then, the researchers started defining the unit for analysis at the lexical level (see Figure 1), but relations between words, sentences, and paragraphs in the texts were also checked because linguistic creativity could be found across the texts.Since the coding for qualitative content analysis can be derived from theories (Zhang & Wildemuth, 2005), the obtained students' written texts were then analyzed and coded based on Zawada's (2006) linguistic creativity taxonomy.The codes used in analyzing the text were FLC for formal lexical creativity, SLC for semantic lexical creativity, SLC for syntagmatic lexical choice, and PLC for paradigmatic lexical choice.These codes were followed by the Roman numerals to indicate in which text the linguistic creativity was marked in the text and Arabic numerals to provide information on the n th sentence they appeared in the data.For example, one of the analyzed analyzed text data had the coding pattern shown in Table 1.
We should not recklessly select OSIS administrators because the OSIS representatives will someday carry the school's reputation.
PLC denotes that the sentence exemplifies the paradigmatic lexical choice at the lexical level.While IX symbolizes that the example comes from text IX in our data, the 4 indicates that the sentence is the fourth sentence in the text.By doing this, the data analysis could be tallied and coded consistently.Furthermore, to maintain the trustworthiness of the data analysis, each analyzed data was discussed with other experts in relation to the topic, and changes were made when inconsistency or mistake in creating codification took place.The literal translation is presented to enable consideration of how each word choice is adjusted in the context of the English language.
Each word, underlined in the students' natural language of Indonesian and in English, has the same meaning.

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION Findings
After conducting the content analysis of the students' texts, the research findings explored the taxonomy of linguistic creativity following Zawada's (2006) taxonomy, specifically represented in formal lexical creativity, semantic lexical creativity, paradigmatic lexical choice, and syntagmatic lexical choice (see Table 2).As displayed in Table 2, the highest lexical creativity used by Indonesian 8th-grade students was formal lexical creativity, followed by paradigmatic lexical choice, semantic lexical creativity, and syntagmatic lexical choice, which were the least strategies used.Even though students' linguistic creativity at the lexical level is not distributed evenly, the students have demonstrated that they are capable of deploying different strategies in creating arguments in their writing.

Formal Lexical Creativity
Formal lexical creativity was the students' most frequent linguistic creativity in building arguments and developing the text.In this research, to be considered formal lexical creativity, only derivative words occurring in one text are included in the calculation.Table 3 displays the example of students' formal lexical creativity in the argumentative text.When using formal lexical creativity, the students use a base word and then creatively change the affixation of the words to create a particular effect, for example, using nominalization to state shared responsibility.In FLC.I.1, FLC.I.5, and FLC.I.6, the student who composed the text could manipulate the base word bersih (clean), which is an adjective word to a noun kebersihan (cleanliness)and a transitive active verb membersihkan (to clean).The word forms of kebersihan and membersihkan in the examples are classified as derivative forms, and the affix consisting of the word kebersihan means ideas about the word's basic form, while the affix consisting of the word membersihkan means performing the word's action according to its basic form.Students choose the word kebersihan so that the creative construction is built in accordance with Indonesian rules.The word membersihkan in the phrase "clean the body" results from associative thinking regarding the phrase "cleanse our spiritual."The word membersihkan is usually used to accompany objects in the form of concrete nouns.Thus, through associative thinking, students are able to create creative constructions such as "cleanse our spiritual."A similar case is also found in FLC.VIII.7 and FLC.VIII.9,where students used different derivations to build their arguments, but in the example, the students did not provide the base word pilih (select) and directly used the derivative form.The word-formation strategies used in the examples were nominalization by using the prefix and affix combination to nominalize in pemilihan (vote), a prefix to make a transitive active verb in memilih (to select), and a prefix to create a passive verb in dipilih (to be selected).Another form of formal lexical creativity found in the students' text was reduplication.The function of reduplication used in FLX.XI. is to highlight and emphasize the danger of consuming drugs.The findings of the study in formal lexical creativity in the L1 context are dissimilar from the findings in the L2 context (see Ningsih et al., 2021) and a looser context, like band naming López Rúa (2010).

Semantic Lexical Creativity
Semantic lexical creativity requires words with different meanings, either narrowing or expanding in meaning, appearing 35 times.The examples of semantic lexical creativity deployed in students' argumentative texts are portrayed in Table 4.

Code
Indonesian Language Translation
…there are many people saying that band members are close with drugs.
Therefore, the government opens rehabilitation center for drug addicts who wanted to free from drugs.
…while school wants their reputation disgraced.
In SLC.I.1, three semantic lexical choices are used in the sentence fragment.First, the word disinggahi (passivized verb) has the base word singgah (visit or drop by for a moment), but in the given example, the student used it to imply the harmful existence of garbage and permanent effect, not temporary.Second, the student wrote bibit-bibit (seeds) to state the source of disease (penyakit), and the word bibit commonly appears when discussing plantation, not when writing about health.Third, enak (delicious or comfortable) is likely to be used to talk about the taste of food or a pleasant condition, but here, it is used to express stink.Another example of semantic lexical is shown in SLC.XI.10.The term anak band comes from combining anak (child) and band (borrowing from English), and the meaning of the combination of anak and band is changed to something between band members or fans of a band.In the Indonesian language, the word "band" represents a group of people playing music; thus, it differs from Zawada's (2006) example.Then, in SLC.XI.14, the word obat-obatan (medicines) is used to refer to the drugs.If the student used obat-obatan terlarang (illegal medicines meant drugs), it is a pretty common phrase in Bahasa Indonesia.But, here, by writing obat-obatan, the meaning becomes narrow to only drugs.Lastly, the student wrote two semantic lexical creativity words in SLC.VIII.12:nama (name), baik (good), and tercemar (polluted).The student selected nama baik to refer to the word reputation, which indicates semantic lexical creativity because the student might want to stress the importance of the school as having a good reputation.

Paradigmatic Lexical Choice
As the second most frequently used strategy, paradigmatic lexical choice, where the students opted for different lexical items to point at similar things, could be found with various purposes (see Table 5).The first purpose is to assert their understanding of the complex issues, which was exemplified in PLC.V.5, where students tried to build arguments on why neighborhood watch is an essential activity in society by using the word rukun (get along well) instead of berdamai (reconcile) after the neighbors had heated arguments.In Bahasa Indonesia, rukun means the people do not fight nor quarrel, and it is similar to peaceful situations but more personal.Then, berdekatan (getting close) in the given context is expressed as having a similar schedule instead of a position or relation between the two quarreling parties.The selection of rukun and berdekatan can provide a nuanced effect on the student's argument and create a more persuasive tone in the text using synonymous words.
They will get along well at that time because they have a neighborhood watch schedule together.
For example, it can destroy the younger generation's future… PLC.III.8 Banyak para pahlawan yang telah gugur di medan perang demi bangsa Indonesia.
There were many heroes fell in the battlefield for Indonesia.
In Bahasa Indonesia, narkoba stands for narkotika dan obat terlarang (narcotics and illegal drugs), and instead of using drugs to refer to narcotics only, obat terlarang is written by the student not only to specify prohibited substances, including the narcotics but also to include other drugs that the government prohibits or limits in circulation or use.In this way, the word selection is used to describe the thing using a more general description or part of the abbreviation of narkoba.Then, in PLC.XII.5, anak bangsa is written metaphorically to denote the younger generation of a nation.The student manipulates the lexical choice of the next generation or younger people with anak (child) and bangsa (nation).In the last example, the student tried to give proper verbs for specific people.Gugur, meaning die, but it is used only for the heroes who died on the battlefield or officers who died on duty.It is used in the text in place of meninggal or mati, which also means "die."Using gugur in this context was appropriate because the student discussed the freedom fighter who fought for Indonesian Independence.

Syntagmatic Lexical Choice
Syntagmatic lexical choice, involving lexical choices that go together (semantic prosody) and unexpected collocations (Zawada, 2006), displayed in Table 6, was the least frequent type of lexical creativity in the students' argumentative text.Although all the texts the students produced indicate their ability to use them, the level of semantic lexical choice seems to leave more room for improvement.

Coding
Word Choice in the Indonesian language Translation to English Language
… garbage is things that can be a source for different diseases and can create unpleasant smell.SLC.XI.
…they realize that drugs are the devil who devastates the younger generation.SLC.III.1 Akhir ajaran tahun ini saya ingin sekali pergi berwisata ke Museum Perjuangan At the end of the semester, I want to visit Museum Perjuangan.
As can be seen from the example from the students' argumentative text, they used some unexpected collocations.These uncommon collocations are deployed in building students' arguments in relation to the flow of ideas and to create particular effects in their arguments.For example, to maintain the flow of ideas, the word menggunakan (to use something) is collocated with the word television, and the most common verb in collocation to be applied with television is menonton (to watch), but the student wrote menggunakan to highlight that television can be used as a tool to gain knowledge.While creating a certain sense of the argument, in SLC.I.1, the student wrote disinggahi (visited or dropped by for a moment) is usually used when people stop at a place not for a long time and often has positive meanings, but in this context, the timing seems to be perpetual and negative.Thus, this is the students' effort to tone down the argument to persuade readers not to litter.Differently, certain word choices in narkoba itu setan have a different effect on readers regarding how harmful and dangerous drugs are.In the Indonesian language, drugs are often associated with illegal drugs or illicit drugs, but rarely it is juxtaposed directly with the devil who destroys the generations.This effort is the student's attempt to avoid drugs at all costs strongly.A milder shift in meaning was shown in SLC.III.1,where the student showed a different perception about visiting a museum.The use of berwisata (to visit tourist sites) instead of mengunjungi (visit).In this logic, the student believes that going to the museum is a tourism activity.

Discussion
Examination of the findings from the students' argumentative essays illuminates the lexical creativity of the students used in constructing their arguments.From four categories of lexical creativity, formal lexical creativity, semantic lexical creativity, paradigmatic lexical choice, and syntagmatic lexical choice, formal lexical creativity, as displayed in Table 3, is the most frequently used lexical creativity in junior high students' essays.This finding aligns with Vallès (2003), who reported that the derivational lexical choice using affixes is usually high.All lexical creativity in the data is from word-formation strategy, with derivation as the most frequent type and one reduplication.The derivative forms of the results of student creativity in the research data consisted of adding prefixes, adding suffixes, combining prefixes and suffixes, and combining bound forms.These forms are potentially used productively in the context of the Indonesian language.In addition, using basic forms and derivative forms in the presented sentences is a product of students' thinking.In other words, changing the basic form to the derivative form indicates the language creativity of the students.Using these word forms shows the writers' thinking quality because language and thought are closely intertwined (Chomsky, 2009;Zawada, 2006).Although Gay (1980) considered it weak linguistic creativity because it is based on structural rules, it is still a form of linguistic creativity (Hanks, 2013).Differently with the music scene, where different types of lexical creativity have no boundary, especially in the naming of the band (López Rúa) or L2 settings contexts where students sometimes include other languages, the formality in the educational context restricts the use of other subcategories of lexical creativity.The nonexistence of a word-creation strategy in the data we obtained might be because the students have shown their understanding that they were required to write in a formal context and that using a wordcreation strategy is inappropriate.Apart from being new and original, Simonton has enunciated the time appropriateness of using certain types of creativity in specific contexts (2012( , cited in Hoffmann, 2020)).Thus, the contexts where the writing is produced cause lead to the limitation of certain types of lexical creativity Even though the frequency of semantic lexical creativity was the lowest in the data, the students were somewhat capable of deploying this type of creativity.As can be seen from the selected examples in Table 4, the students are able to use semantic lexical creativity to build arguments based on the topics they selected.Potentially, the meanings of the words used in the examples are broadened, but contextually, readers can decode the overall message the student tried to deliver directly and effortlessly.Thus, the practice the student did in the example is possibly deliberate choices when constructing the argument.The use of semantic lexical creativity can also indicate that students might use words with different meanings because they could not find the correct words to deliver what they have in their minds (Löfkvist, 2014).Students' semantic lexical creativity signifies that students' effort to manipulate word meanings and associations occurs in presenting arguments and in articulating their case more nuancedly (Ofoegbu & Usar, 2018).Also, it shows students' attempts to ponder their language use outside conventional language patterns.
In the paradigmatic lexical choice subcategory, one identified strategy the students wrote that can be regarded as linguistic creativity was to use the phrase obat terlarang, which denotes a more general description of an abbreviation.This example is part of linguistic creativity because Zawada (2009) argues that the kind selection of lexical items or utterances produced in a text is one configuration of linguistic creativity.Besides that, the students used metaphorical expressions to build their arguments in the essay.This finding aligns with the work of Clair (1999), who argues that metaphor is an intrinsic part of human creativity and plays significant roles in linguistic creativity and change.The position is evident in the metaphors used by students because these metaphors can evoke the reader's imagination to believe what the student wants to convey.Again, the appropriateness of using lexical choice has been shown in the data.The word gugur is included in the lexical creativity because creativity needs to not only maintain the fluency of ideas but also to be appropriate is also important (Simonton, 2012, cited in Hoffmann, 2020).These findings shed light on the application of paradigmatic lexical choice of the students in building their arguments fluently and appropriately.
Even though the syntagmatic lexical choice is unusual in the data, the collocations used in the students' essays can still be understood by the readers effortlessly (Bartsch, 2004;Fellbaum, 2015).Also, the students have somewhat successfully conveyed the message economically and toned down or intensified the message by using collocations.In generating creative forms of collocation, students' knowledge and abilities are necessary; both tools are essential to creating new forms of collocation.The collocations used by students demonstrate aspects of originality.The students form collocations creatively through analogical thinking.This finding is in accordance with the position that the capacity to think by analogy is the essential element of creative thought (Torrance, 1972).Through the use of various collocations, various ideas can be conveyed by the use of collocation flexibly, and the reason for this is the diversity concerning the ability to generate multiple ideas and exhibit students' linguistic creativity because they know and use syntagmatic lexical choice (Zawada, 2006).

CONCLUSION
This article investigates the lexical creativity of Indonesian eighth-grade students in constructing contentions for their self-selected argumentative texts and have demonstrated how the eighth-grade students apply different lexical creativity in argumentative essays.A content analysis of 12 selfselected topic argumentative texts the eighth-grade students composed in Indonesian as a first language subject found that students have incorporated different strategies into their argumentative writing, demonstrating their linguistic creativity at the lexical level.Then, it was also found that the most frequent use of lexical creativity documented in the essays was formal lexical creativity, with derivation as the leading choice, followed by paradigmatic lexical choice, syntagmatic lexical choice, and semantic lexical creativity.Also, the data indicate that the students have shown their awareness of the writing context by avoiding the word-creation strategy, which might be deemed inappropriate for the given task.Since students in this grade seem adept at navigating language rules creatively and constructing their ideas using rule-governed strategies, it seems beneficial to let students explore linguistic creativity at the lexical level to build arguments by encouraging students to experiment with different lexical items.Teachers can also provide some exercises or practices to improve students' syntagmatic lexical choices and semantic lexical creativity to provide more refined arguments in their writings.This effort can assist students in writing argumentative texts effectively and efficiently using different lexical items and creating a more nuanced and intriguing text.
It is important to note that this research might have some limitations, such as the absence of a creativity assessment that can be done using the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT), which can be used to see the linguistic realization of considered highly creative and less creative students, and this research did not take into account other categories of linguistic creativity; they are at the grammar and discourse levels that, when combined, might provide a more comprehensive portrayal of linguistic creativity.For future research, expanding the dataset and including more samples can provide a more comprehensive portrayal of students' linguistic creativity in the L1 context.Besides, investigating students' linguistic creativity in different genres might be valuable in depicting students' creativity in language use across various texts.

Table 2
Eighth-Grade Students' Use of Lexical Creativity in Argumentative Text

Table 3
Sample of Formal Lexical Creativities from the Students' Texts