Linguistic creativity and metaphoricity are unique qualities of human beings. The thesis has at-tempted to shed light on the creative usage of idioms from linguistic, psycholinguistic, and cog-nitive linguistic perspectives. Besides, genre/discourse theory is integrated into the analysis in order to explain idiomatic creativity from the point of view of identity construction and the rela-tion between the writer and the discourse community. Moreover, idiomatic creativity is ap-proached from a

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... etic perspective, according to which linguistic innovation could be ex-plained in terms of normal and altered replication. The most important conclusion of the research is that the combination of factors predetermines the creative potential of idiomatic language, namely context, genre/discourse, decomposability and familiarity.