The paper brings to attention the issue of creativity in the interpretation of denominal verbs from an experimental and theoretical perspective. More specifically, by asking a group of ten Romanian native speakers for paraphrases and sentences for twenty non-existent, but possible denominal verbs (such as "a cireși" ‘to cherry’, "a struguri" ‘to grape’, "a vulpi" ‘to fox’ a.o), the paper supports the validity of Kiparsky (1997)’s Canonical Use Principle, bringing some amendments regarding its extension to animals, human roles, by proposing that the lexicon contains ‘BEHAVE (LIKE) N’, ‘BECOME LIKE N’ structures a.o.