Table Of ContentPhraseology and
Style in Subgenres
of the Novel
A Synthesis of Corpus
and Literary Perspectives
Edited by
Iva Novakova · Dirk Siepmann
Phraseology and Style in Subgenres of the Novel
Iva Novakova · Dirk Siepmann
Editors
Phraseology
and Style
in Subgenres
of the Novel
A Synthesis of Corpus and Literary
Perspectives
Editors
Iva Novakova Dirk Siepmann
Grenoble Alpes University University of Osnabrück
Grenoble, France Osnabrück, Germany
ISBN 978-3-030-23743-1 ISBN 978-3-030-23744-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23744-8
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Preface
The genesis of this book was in a four-year collaborative research project
PhraseoRom1 on the phraseology of contemporary novels, co-funded
by the French National Research Agency (ANR2) and the German
Research Foundation (DFG3). It is one of the few international projects
to truly bring together researchers from both literary studies and lin-
guistics. The book, whose ten chapters report on selected results of this
project, revolves around a detailed analysis and classification of recur-
rent fiction-specific patterns found in fictional genres and their gen-
eral functions, as revealed by sophisticated corpus-driven enquiry. It
focuses both on patterns found in the novel generally and genre-spe-
cific patterns shared by various literary genres. In addition, the book
1https://phraseorom.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr. The PhraseoRom project (2016–2020), led by
I. Novakova (University Grenoble Alpes, France) and Dirk Siepmann (University of Osnabrück,
Germany), brought together 25 researchers from different French and German universities
[University Grenoble Alpes, Sorbonne-Nouvelle Paris 3 University, University of Montpellier
(France), University of Bonn, University of Osnabrück and University of Erlangen-Nuremberg
(Germany)].
2Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR).
3Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).
v
vi Preface
compares and contrasts the stylistic practices encountered in British,
American and French contemporary novels published since the 1950s
and discusses implications these might have for phraseology or literary
translation.
The book lies at the intersection of corpus, computational linguistics,
and stylistics and is resolutely situated within the digital humanities.
It is our hope that it will lend impetus to genre studies by being the
first large-scale project to employ Natural Language Processing (NLP)
and digital stylistics tools to describe literary genres not just in terms
of traditional rhetoric or grammar, but more so as lexico-grammatical
artifacts based on recurrent patterns. Thus, the book is primarily con-
cerned with phraseological aspects of style. Since our aim is to explore
the recurrent features of fictional genres and their general functions, we
rarely consider specific authors or novels individually here, although our
methodology could also serve to identify author-specific lexico-syntactic
patterns.
Generally speaking, our research has produced persuasive evidence
to suggest that the identification of recurrent patterns, often called
“motifs” in the French literature on the subject (Longrée and Mellet
2013; Legallois 2012), enables researchers to better distinguish the spe-
cificities of different literary genres. Viewed from this angle, literariness
arises from the significant over-representation of particular motifs in
specific literary genres, most of which are so discreetly conventional that
the reader may not consciously notice them. Put succinctly, motifs are
genre markers at sentence level. Where genre theory is concerned, the
innovative potential of our approach is in particular due to the avenues
it opens to considering long-standing debates on feature analysis, genre
distinction and the hybridization of genres from a new vantage point
and by deploying a new, interdisciplinary methodology.
Presentation of the Chapters
The chapters of this book are arranged systematically to build up the
picture, starting with general issues and general fiction and then moving
on to comparisons between specific genres.
Preface vii
Chapter 1, written by I. Novakova and D. Siepmann, outlines lin-
guistic approaches to literature, to phraseology and idiomaticity, as well
as new approaches in stylistics and in theories of literary genre for char-
acterizing the recurrent lexico-grammatical patterns in contemporary
fiction. It also summarizes our methodology, presents our corpora and
highlights the book’s innovative features.
Chapter 2 (D. Legallois and S. Koch) proposes an overview of the
term “motif” which refers to recurring patterns in different disciplines:
folkloristics, narratology, bioinformatics, NLP and linguistics.
Chapter 3 (I. Novakova, D. Siepmann and M. Gymnich) analyzes
the key adverbs and adverbial motifs in English and their functional
equivalents in French novels using the keyword approach (Scott and
Tribble 2006).
Chapter 4 (S. Diwersy, L. Gonon, V. Goossens, M. Gymnich and
A. Tutin) deals with verbs introducing direct speech in English and
French contemporary fiction (especially in the crime, fantasy and
romancesubgenres).
Chapter 5 (F. Grossmann, M. Gymnich and D. Siepmann) investigates
the expressions related to alcohol and tobacco consumption in post-war
English and French fiction from a corpus-stylistic and corpus-driven van-
tage point.
Chapter 6 (L. Gonon and O. Kraif) compares the “fiction words”
(neologisms) in French and American science fiction during the 1990s
to determine to which extent two different literary traditions may share
a common background of fictional references, mixing elements that
come from various “xenoencyclopedias” (Saint-Gelais 1999).
Chapter 7 (V. Goossens, C. Jacquot and S. Dyka) distinguishes
between the two fictional genres of science fiction and fantasy through
an original semantic and stylistic classification of the recurrent narrative
patterns and related motifs in the corpora.
Chapter 8 (J. Sorba, L. Gonon, S. Dyka and V. Goossens) considers
the discursive functions of motifs generated by the expressions écrire/lire
une lettre, un roman, write/read a letter, a novel in general contemporary
fiction in comparison with a corpus of crime novels.
viii Preface
Chapter 9 (S. Dyka, L. Fesenmeier and M. Gymnich) studies the
motifs generated by the structures “dans un état de NP/in a state of NP”
from functional and stylistic points of view in six subgenres: general,
crime, romance, fantasy, historical and science fiction.
Chapter 10 (I. Novakova and D. Siepmann) outlines the most salient
results of our research while emphasizing the interdisciplinary approach
applied in differentiating contemporary fiction subgenres. It also points
out the avenues the book opens to fruitful future research in the digital
humanities.
Grenoble, France Iva Novakova
Osnabrück, Germany Dirk Siepmann
References
Legallois, Dominique. 2012. “La Colligation: autre nom de la collocation
grammaticale ou autre logique de la relation mutuelle entre syntaxe et
sémantique?” Corpus 11. http://corpus.revues.org/2202.
Longrée, Dominique, and Sylvie Mellet. 2013. “Le Motif: une unité
phraséologique englobante? Étendre le champ de la phraséologie de la
langue au discours.” Langages 189: 68–80.
Saint-Gelais, Richard. 1999. L’Empire du pseudo: Modernités de la science-fic-
tion. Québec: Nota Bene.
Scott, Mike, and Christopher Tribble. 2006. Textual patterns: Key words and
corpus analysis in language education. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Acknowledgements
We owe a great debt of gratitude to Professor Marion Gymnich
(University of Bonn, Germany) for her invaluable aid in re-reading
the various chapters of this book. We sincerely appreciate, too, Denise
Burkhard’s (University of Bonn, Germany) meticulous work in pre-
paring the manuscript for publication, and express our thanks to her.
Finally, we are indebted to Henry Randolph (Tek Ryder Translations,
California, USA) for his skilful editing and proofreading of the draft
chapters.
ix
Contents
1 Literary Style, Corpus Stylistic, and Lexico-Grammatical
Narrative Patterns: Toward the Concept of Literary Motifs 1
Iva Novakova and Dirk Siepmann
2 The Notion of Motif Where Disciplines Intersect:
Folkloristics, Narrativity, Bioinformatics, Automatic
Text Processing and Linguistics 17
Dominique Legallois and Stefan Koch
3 Key Adverbs and Adverbial Motifs in English Fiction
and their French Functional Equivalents 47
Iva Novakova, Dirk Siepmann and Marion Gymnich
4 Speech Verbs in French and English Novels 83
Sascha Diwersy, Laetitia Gonon, Vannina Goossens,
Marion Gymnich and Agnès Tutin
xi
