![]() Most corpora are put together with careful attention toward achieving balance, so that the corpus as a whole is as much as possible a representative sample of contemporary or historical language drawn from a wide range of genres, often capturing both published texts and transcriptions of speech. A corpus (plural: corpora) is a collection of natural language in machine-readable form, assembled for the purpose of linguistic research. Today, lexicographers and other language researchers have a tool that makes the study of language much easier and more evidence-based than ever before: the corpus. My research, on the other hand, has identified hundreds of phrases that are frequently used-indeed, surely overused-in English and that I think readers will agree are clichés, even though many of them have not traditionally been treated as clichés in popular or scholarly literature. Yet hundreds of these idioms fill up the pages of dictionaries of clichés, with little justification for their inclusion according to the very criteria that the compilers of these dictionaries enumerate. Idioms, looked at in isolation, are not necessarily clichés. When asked to produce a cliché, many speakers simply produce an idiom. That is, infrequently used words and phrases may be deemed clichés, simply because a large number of people, or a small number of influential people, find them annoying or designate them as clichés for some other reason. The result of this haphazard process is that many phrases are designated clichés without there being evidence of their frequent use. ![]() ![]() Nearly all judgments about what constitutes a cliché have traditionally relied on consensus: if enough people think a form of words is overused, or if a person who is perceived as having some authority about language declares such a thing, then the word or phrase becomes a cliché. What, exactly, constitutes overuse? Who is to be the judge of effectiveness? You will hardly find a definition of cliché that does not include these ideas, but it is difficult, if not impossible, to find an objective standard by which to gauge them.Īny judgment about whether a form of words is overused was necessarily subjective or speculative before it was possible to gather accurate statistics about language use. The difficulty that arises in the very definition of cliché is that its principal characteristics-overuse and ineffectiveness-are not objectively measurable. a sentence or phrase, usually expressing a popular or common thought or idea, that has lost originality, ingenuity, and impact by long overuse.a phrase or opinion that is overused and betrays a lack of original thought.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |