Linguistic Readymades and Creative Reuse

Creativity often arises from a process of appropriation, in which something is wrenched from its normative context of use and given new meaning in a new setting. In this vein, Marcel Duchamp popularized the notion of an artistic ready-made when his Fountain – a signed urinal – was presented with some controversy at a Dada exhibition in 1917. We normally think of readymades as physical objects whose artistic merit derives wholly from their selection by an artist, but language is also rich in linguistic readymades. Just think of how many movies, songs, novels and poems allusively borrow utterances and phrases from each other. The movie The Usual Suspects, for example, takes its name from a famous quote from the movie Casablanca, while the novel All The King’s Men takes it title from a famous nursery rhyme; this title, in turn, inspired the title of Woodward and Bernstein’s book All The President’s Men. Large lexical resources, such as corpora and databases of Web n-grams, are a rich source of readymade phrases that can be reused in many different contexts. However, one must be careful in how these resources are used, and noted writers such as George Orwell have argued that the use of canned phrases encourages sloppy thinking and results in poor communication. Nonetheless, while Orwell prized home-made phrases over the readymade variety, Duchamp created a vibrant movement in modern art which shifted the emphasis of artistic creation from the production of novel artifacts to the clever reuse of readymades or objets trouvés. We describe here a system that makes creative reuse of the linguistic readymades in the Google n-grams. Our computational systems thus owe more to Duchamp than to Orwell, and harvest readymades on a large scale to support linguistic creativity.