Talking, Creating: Interactional Language, Creativity, and Context

When creative uses of spoken language have been investigated, the main examples have been restricted to particular contexts such as narrative and related story-telling genres. This paper reports on an initial investigation using the 5 million word CANCODE corpus of everyday spoken English and discusses a range of social contexts in which creative uses of language are manifested. A main conclusion reached is that creative language use often signposts the nature of interpersonal relationships, plays an important role in the construction of identities and is more likely to emerge in social contexts marked by non-institutionalized, symmetrical, and informal talk. The paper also argues that different creative patterns of talk are produced for different purposes, that dines and continua best capture such distinctions and that applications of such understandings to language learning and teaching, including the teaching of literature and culture, can benefit from closer scrutiny of such data.