This article takes further debates concerning the nature of literary language and the presence of literariness in a range of discourses by exploring the extent to which everyday conversational discourse displays literary properties. The article argues that the inherent creativity of so-called ‘ordinary’, ‘everyday’ language has been overlooked by researchers, who have tended to focus on literary texts or on more obviously creative discourse such as advertising language. The data explored in this article are drawn from the CANCODE project which is one of the most extensive collections of informal spoken English currently available. The main argument developed is that both social and psychological models are needed to explain the phenomena of ‘pattern-developing’ and ‘pattern-forming’ which are described in the collected data.1
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