We describe a number of communicative goals that lead speakers to produce creative utterances. We argue that speakers produce utterances that incorporate, for example, metaphors, lexical innovations, or indirectness, because they wish to express their intended meanings as accurately as their language allows. Speakers, we suggest, also create new meanings because of the social demands on them. Finally, we discuss the consequences of creativity for theories of language production.
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Gerrig et al. (1988) studied this question.
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