Creativity and Television Drama: A t-Score and MI Value Cut-off Analysis of Pattern-forming Creativity in House M.D.

Abstract

Carter (2004) theorises creativity in everyday talk into two main categories: pattern-reforming and pattern-forming. This chapter extends the discussion on pattern-forming creativity appeared in popular TV drama House M.D., with an attempt to demonstrate how statistical devices such as t-score and MI value may be used to facilitate the extraction of this type of linguistic creativity. The extraction is facilitated by 2-word concgrams, mutual information (MI) and t-score, which are generated from the TV drama’s dialogue corpus. The t-scores and MI values of 2-word concgrams from a total of 67 episodes are analysed through a quantitative approach. It is found that t-score and MI value of 2-word concgrams can be used to locate pattern-forming creativity, and their cut-offs can effectively double the percentage yield of pattern-forming creativity. This chapter proposes several ways to improve efficiency in the extraction of pattern-forming creativity and provides statistical evidence for the relationship between pattern-forming creativity and MI and t-score.