Extended phraseological units and literary genres

Abstract

The present paper is based on the assumption that the language of the novel as well as that of its various subgenres is characterized by a statistically relevant overrepresentation of certain linguistic phenomena (e.g., lexemes, key words, collocations and colligations, Siepmann, 2015, 2016). Applying state-of-the-art lexicometric methods to extract recurring polylexical units in two large corpora of contemporary French and English novels, we explore the role of phraseological motifs in distinguishing literary subgenres. Unlike traditional corpus-stylistic analyses, which frequently focus on the style of a single author, our corpus-driven approach identifies features of literary (prose) genres on the basis of automatically extracted lexico-syntactic constructions (LSCs) that are statistically specific to a certain subgenre.