Abstract: 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 trouv's. 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.
Keywords: Readymades, creativity, reuse, information retrieval
