Cliche Expressions in Literary and Genre Novels

Code

• github.com/andreasvc/litcliches
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Abstract

Should writers ``avoid clich\'es like the plague''? Clich\'es are said to be a prominent characteristic of ``low brow'' literature, and conversely, a negative marker of ``high brow'' literature. Clich\'es may concern the storyline, the characters, or the style of writing. We focus on clich\'e 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 clich\'e expressions can be attested in a corpus of various kinds of contemporary fiction, based on a large, curated lexicon of clich\'e expressions. The results show to what extent the negative view on clich\'es is supported by data: we find a significant negative correlation of -0.48 between clich\'e density and literary ratings of texts. We also investigate interactions with genre and characterize the language of clich\'es with several basic textual features. Code used for this paper is available at https://github.com/andreasvc/litcliches/

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