This book offers a linguistic account of recombinant creativity (RC) as a mechanism by which speakers proactively re-use and re-adapt the utterances and the actions of their interlocutors. The book argues that this creative process of ‘complex imitation’ is central in human behaviour and is key for interactional engagement, conceptual categorisation, innovation and intercultural adaptation. With a specific focus on phenomena of RC, the book provides a novel model of analysis of dialogue for the theoretical and applied study of pragmatic competence and grammatical knowledge in language acquisition, language change, across the autistic spectrum, in cross-cultural communication and artificial intelligence.