Abstract
The article deals with the use of particles in common spoken Czech in terms of language creativity and convention. It is based on material from the Prague Spoken Corpus, the first Czech spoken corpus.
On two dozen selected adverbs and particles, the corpus examples follow the processes of particularization in the context in which the original adverbs acquire new meanings - taking a stand on something, adopting a posture, attitude, expressing an evaluation, etc., which is a contextual realization of the new function in the statement. The functional shift in a word's meaning has primarily the role of pragmatic commentary in the utterance.
Particularization of expressions can be considered as an expression of language creativity. On the contrary, the most frequent particles in the spoken language are examples of language convention.