Speaker: Emilie Sitter @emilie.sitter
Affiliation: Bielefeld University
Co-authors: Sina Zarrieß and Berenike Herrmann
Title: * How creative is literariness? Towards a theoretical-empirical framework for assessing linguistic creativity in fiction*
Abstract (long version below): The paper outlines a theoretical-empirical framework for assessing linguistic creativity and literariness in literary texts. While literariness often only reflects the communicative success of a linguistic sign, creativity additionally requires a sign to be original. Working with large German literary and non-literary corpora, we employ a mixed-methods approach to disentangle the two dimensions. Human ratings serve as our ground-truth for evaluating creativity and literariness. We focus on metaphor usage, distinguishing conventional from novel and remotivated metaphors by correlating their frequencies with the human ratings. Our approach integrates rhetorical, computational, and contextual factors, advancing predictive models of linguistic creativity.
Long abstract
Our paper presents steps towards a theoretical-empirical framework for assessing linguistic creativity and literariness in literary texts. Research on linguistic creativity often does not properly distinguish between these two dimensions (e.g. Carter 2016, 66). The method we develop aims at providing an empirical account for literariness and linguistic creativity across literary genres and domains.
A linguistic sign needs to be effective and original to be creative (Runco and Jaeger 2012). We conceptualize effectiveness as the communicative success of the sign. In literary texts, success might encompass canonicity (Barré, Camps, and Poibeau 2023), text complexity (Kintsch 2012), or readers’ aesthetic appreciation (Crosbie, French, and Conrad 2013; Koolen et al. 2020). (A certain kind of) success might be a sufficient prerequisite for establishing literariness. However, a linguistic sign that is very literary can still be highly conventionalized. Creativity additionally requires it to be novel and/or original in its context.
For assessing the degree of creativity of literary texts in a context-sensitive way, we need to disentangle creativity from literariness. We work on a dataset of spatial descriptions extracted from large German literary and non-literary corpora. Our literary corpus consists of around 35,000 texts from 1850 to 1939 (Horstmann 2019). The non-literary corpus, currently comprising the German WikiVoyage corpus (Nolda 2024; around 20,000 texts) and several travel blogs, is successively being expanded. Our mixed-methods approach aims to detect instances of original and successful language use contextualized as literary within the extracted passages.
In contrast to approaches that look at purely text-immanent features (e.g. Jacobs and Kinder 2022), our creativity “ground truth” is provided by human annotators. In a large-scale rating study (to be completed in early 2025), lay readers rate the passages’ originality, success, and literariness. The results of this study depend on the context provided to the participants, their reading habits (Kuijpers, Douglas, and Kuiken 2020), and their reading engagement (Dai and Wang 2007). Simultaneously, we study the texts at the reception level. We assume that certain aspects of their success can also be derived from text-extrinsic features, such as online reviews (Walsh and Antoniak 2021; Jacobsen et al. 2024).
Our assessment of creativity at textual level encompasses various steps. We leverage computational creativity metrics to predict the human creativity ratings (Weinstein et al. 2022; Zedelius, Mills, and Schooler 2019) and approach literariness through rhetorical devices. Building on prior research that has studied metaphor for literary vividness (Herrmann 2018), our focus is on the usage of novel and remotivated metaphors (Semino and Steen, 2008; DiStefano, Patterson, and Beaty 2024).
In the current paper, literary metaphor detection will be based on a manual annotation procedure (Herrmann 2023; Steen et al. 2010). Metaphor frequencies will then be correlated with human creativity assessments to determine the role metaphors have in the textual context for the constitution of linguistic creativity. We can determine the degree of novelty or remotivation of metaphor in contexts such as:
(1) Ein Wässerlein aber floß aus dem höchsten Schneefeld, und wie es gleich einem Schlänglein zwischen Felsen dahinschlüpfte, klang es silberhell, lachte und lockte wie eine ferne Schalmei.
But a little stream flowed from the highest snowfield, and as it slipped like a little snake between rocks, it sounded silvery bright, laughed and lured like a distant shawm.
Bruno Wille: Die Abendburg (1909, transl. by us)
(2) Dort floß mit dunkeln und hellen Strähnen ein Wasser, vermutlich die Rhône, außerdem drehte sich darin der Widerschein der Laternen, wie lange Dochte von Nachtlichtern, die auf dem Grund des Wassers festgemacht waren.
There flowed a water with dark and light strands, probably the Rhône, also the reflection of the lanterns turned in it, like long wicks of night lights tied to the bottom of the water.
René Schickele: Der Wolf in der Hürde (1931, transl. by us)
In the examples, (1) contains relatively conventional metaphors, revolving around the personification of a happy and adorable river in an idyllic context (and genre): no friction is perceived between the distinct metaphorical source domains. By contrast, (2) comprises several metaphors and a simile that convene in building a fictitious scene where ‘wicks’ of old fashioned night lights are ‘tied to the bottom of the water’: the linguistic construction originally maps the flowing water (source domain) of the river onto the body of a night light (target domain).
Discussing the example of metaphor creativity (including most recent proposals for automatization of metaphor detection as that by Hicke and Kristensen-McLachlan 2024), we suggest that the differentiation of creativity from literariness offers a nuanced approach to creativity assessment. It accounts for both text-inherent features and external factors influencing creativity ratings. Building the basis for ensuing steps that entail stylometry and distributional semantics, the proposed paper contributes to the development of predictive models that align closely with human perceptions of creativity, while highlighting the importance of genre and literary context.
References
Barré, Jean, Jean-Baptiste Camps, and Thierry Poibeau. 2023. “Operationalizing Canonicity: A Quantitative Study of French 19th and 20th Century Literature.” Journal of Cultural Analytics 8 (3). https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.88113.
Carter, Ronald. 2016. Language and Creativity: The Art of Common Talk. Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Language-and-Creativity-The-Art-of-Common-Talk/Carter/p/book/9780415699839.
Crosbie, Tess, Tim French, and Marc Conrad. 2013. “Towards a Model for Replicating Aesthetic Literary Appreciation.” In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Semantic Web Information Management, 1–4. SWIM ’13. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/2484712.2484720.
Dai, David Yun, and Xiaolei Wang. 2007. “The Role of Need for Cognition and Reader Beliefs in Text Comprehension and Interest Development.” Contemporary Educational Psychology 32 (3): 332–47. Redirecting.
DiStefano, Paul V., John D. Patterson, and Roger E. Beaty. 2024. “Automatic Scoring of Metaphor Creativity with Large Language Models.” Creativity Research Journal, March. https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2024.2326343.
Herrmann, Berenike. 2018. “Anschaulichkeit messen. Eine quantitative Metaphernanalyse an deutschsprachigen Erzählanfängen zwischen 1880 und 1926.” In Show, don’t tell: Konzepte und Strategien anschaulichen Erzählens, edited by Tilmann Köppe and Rüdiger Singer, 167–212. Bielefeld: Aisthesis. Show, don't tell von Tilmann Köppe/Rüdiger Singer (kartoniertes Buch) | Buchhandlung Pfister.
Herrmann, Berenike. 2023. “Operationalisierung der Metapher zur quantifizierenden Untersuchung deutschsprachiger literarischer Texte im Übergang vom Realismus zur Moderne.” In Digitale Literaturwissenschaft. Germanistische Symposien, edited by Fotis Jannidis, 629–62. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler. Operationalisierung der Metapher zur quantifizierenden Untersuchung deutschsprachiger literarischer Texte im Übergang vom Realismus zur Moderne | SpringerLink.
Hicke, Rebecca M. M., and Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan. 2024. “SCIENCE IS EXPLORATION: Computational Frontiers for Conceptual Metaphor Theory.” In CHR 2024: Computational Humanities Research Conference, 1105–16. Aarhus, Denmark. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3834/paper60.pdf.
Horstmann, Jan. 2019. “KOLIMO: Korpus Der Literarischen Moderne.” forTEXT. Literatur Digital Erforschen. https://fortext.net/ressourcen/textsammlungen/kolimo-korpus-der-literarischen-moderne.
Jacobs, Arthur, and Annette Kinder. 2022. “Computational Analyses of the Topics, Sentiments, Literariness, Creativity and Beauty of Texts in a Large Corpus of English Literature.” arXiv. [2201.04356] Computational analyses of the topics, sentiments, literariness, creativity and beauty of texts in a large Corpus of English Literature.
Jacobsen, Mia, Yuri Bizzoni, Pascale Feldkamp Moreira, and Kristoffer L. Nielbo. 2024. “Patterns of Quality: Comparing Reader Reception Across Fanfiction and Commercially Published Literature.” In CHR 2024: Computational Humanities Research Conference, 718–39. Aarhus, Denmark. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3834/paper106.pdf.
Kintsch, Walter. 2012. “Musings About Beauty.” Cognitive Science 36 (4): 635–54. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01229.x.
Koolen, Corina, Karina Dalen-Oskam, Andreas Cranenburgh, and Erica Nagelhout. 2020. “Literary Quality in the Eye of the Dutch Reader: The National Reader Survey.” Poetics 79 (February):101439. Redirecting.
Kuijpers, Moniek, Shawn Douglas, and Don Kuiken. 2019. “Personality Traits and Reading Habits That Predict Absorbed Narrative Fiction Reading.” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 13 (1): 74–88. APA PsycNet.
Nolda, Andreas. 2024. “Wikivoyage-Korpus: Korpusquellen der deutschen Sprachversion von Wikivoyage im TEI-Format.” Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (DWDS). zenodo. Wikipedia-Korpus: Korpusquellen der deutschsprachigen Wikipedia im TEI-Format.
Runco, Mark A., and Garret J. Jaeger. 2012. “The Standard Definition of Creativity.” Creativity Research Journal 24 (1): 92–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2012.650092.
Semino, Elena, and Gerard Steen. 2008. “Metaphor in Literature.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, edited by Jr. Gibbs Raymond W., 232–46. Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Metaphor in Literature (CHAPTER 13) - The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought.
Steen, Gerard, Aletta G. Dorst, Berenike Herrmann, Anna A. Kaal, Tina Krennmayr, and Trijntje Pasma. 2010. A Method for Linguistic Metaphor Identiication. From MIP to MIPVU. Vol. 14. Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research (CELCR). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Walsh, Melanie, and Maria Antoniak. 2021. “The Goodreads ‘Classics’: A Computational Study of Readers, Amazon, and Crowdsourced Amateur Criticism.” Journal of Cultural Analytics 6 (2). https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.22221.
Weinstein, Theresa J., Simon Majed Ceh, Christoph Meinel, and Mathias Benedek. 2022. “What’s Creative About Sentences? A Computational Approach to Assessing Creativity in a Sentence Generation Task.” Creativity Research Journal 34 (4): 419–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2022.2124777.
Zedelius, Claire M., Caitlin Mills, and Jonathan W. Schooler. 2019. “Beyond Subjective Judgments: Predicting Evaluations of Creative Writing from Computational Linguistic Features.” Behavior Research Methods 51 (2): 879–94. Beyond subjective judgments: Predicting evaluations of creative writing from computational linguistic features | Behavior Research Methods.