{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/cliche-expressions-in-literary-and-genre","title":"Cliche Expressions in Literary and Genre Novels","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2018-08-01","proceeding":"COLING 2018 8","authors":["Andreas van Cranenburgh"],"abstract":"Should writers {``}avoid clich{\\'e}s like the plague{''}? Clich{\\'e}s are said to be a prominent characteristic of {``}low brow{''} literature, and conversely, a negative marker of {``}high brow{''} literature. Clich{\\'e}s 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{\\'e}s 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{\\'e}s with several basic textual features. Code used for this paper is available at \\url{https://github.com/andreasvc/litcliches/}","url_abs":"https://aclanthology.org/W18-4504","url_pdf":"https://aclanthology.org/W18-4504.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"cliche-expressions-in-literary-and-genre","repo_url":"https://github.com/andreasvc/litcliches","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}