Cliche Expressions in Literary and Genre Novels

摘要

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.