CREATIVITY IN SPOKEN LANGUAGE: A QUESTION–ANSWER DIALOG

When asking for directions, the speaker has plenty of opportunities to display creativity. “Naive” tactic is based on the assumption that the interlocutor is essentially the same as oneself. Creativity emerges when people strive to help each other. Then the speaker takes into account known or supposed characteristics of the interlocutor: age, gender, physical conditions, etc. Heuristic evaluation of such characteristics by the speaker helps achieve the objective of the communication, viz. obtaining information about the location of a certain object and/or the way there. Pragmatic components of the dialog, such as phatic and selfpresentation (with enhancing or disparaging self-evaluation) are also considered. The paper is based on the records of real-life conversations made by the author in 2010–2015.