Cliche expressions in literary and genre novels
Andreas van Cranenburgh · SIGHUM Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities · 2018
Should writers “avoid cliches like the plague”? Cliches are said to be a prominent characteristic of “low brow” literature, and conversely, a negative marker of “high brow” literature. Cliches may concern the storyline, the characters, or the style of writing. We focus on cliche expressions, ready-made stock phrases which can be taken as a sign of uncreative writing. We present a corpus study in which we examine to what extent cliche expressions can be attested in a corpus of various kinds of contemporary fiction, based on a large, curated lexicon of cliche expressions. The results show to what extent the negative view on cliches is supported by data: we find a significant negative correlation of -0.48 between cliche density and literary ratings of texts. We also investigate interactions with genre and characterize the language of cliches with several basic textual features. Code used for this paper is available at https://github.com/andreasvc/litcliches/