A contrastive analysis of two phraseological motifs specific to English and French fantasy and historical novels

This article proposes a contrastive phraseological approach to distinguish and characterize two literary (sub)genres: French and English fantasy (FY) and historical (HIST) novels. The approach is based on recurrent lexico-syntactic constructions, automatically extracted from large corpora of contemporary novels in both languages (since the 1950s). We apply the method of Recurrent Lexical-Syntactic Trees (RLTs, Kraif 2019). The corpus-driven analysis of the two corpora (FY and HIST) is based on the concept of phraseological motifs, which has proved useful in comparing novels in both languages from a linguistic and stylistic point of view. By means of two case studies (on the statistically specific patterns <draw sword>, <dégainer l'épée> in FY and <raised his voice>, <dire d’une voix> in HIST), we are able to conclude that the phraseological motifs are reliable generic markers. They have comparable discourse functions in both languages but differ in their linguistic realizations. The results of our study can feed into corpus stylistics and literary studies on subgenres of the novel in French and English.