Corpus, creativity, cliché: Where statistics meet aesthetics

Abstract

Abstract Lively originality, in literature and elsewhere, is conventionally associated with the avoidance of cliché and well-worn phrasing. But the relations between cliché, idiom, high-frequency use, and their contribution to literary art, are less predictable (for a discussion of the reiteration of the signifier in the visual rather than verbal medium, namely clipart images, see Dillon 2006). There seems to be no direct correlation between how often a phrase appears in the large corpora of contemporary English and how clichéd it is felt to be; and clichédness and idiomaticity seem to be more a matter of perception than of statistical prominence. Conversely, rare collocations are “striking”, but this is not sufficient for purposes of literary art. More important than a striking turn of phrase is an apt one (relative to topic, theme, co-text, cumulative aligned structure: the entire integrated design of the poem). Aptness is an aesthetic category, not a statistical one and not reducible to one, since it applies to a particular, indeed, a unique communicative moment. And the apt word or phrase may not be a novel one.