ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the steady and unfolding scrutiny of creativity in spoken language and continues to itemise and record features in relation to observations of formal patterns and co-creative functions. It explains the full power of the CANCODE corpus, especially its sociolinguistic and interactional design features, utilised to offer a preliminary test of these hypotheses concerning the relationship between creative language use and social context. A full range of different social contexts are explored, but the discussion eschews easy one-for-one correspondences and pay due attention to both the forms and functions and the speaker and listener purposes of creative language use. The chapter explores the extent to which creative language use is evident in different speech genres. The creative use of language is more generally uncommon, but is common to particular social practices and includes contexts in which the self is dramatised, fictionally constructed, and in specific respects creatively contested.
