Subgenres of the novel have traditionally been defined first and foremost in terms of their content. Yet, in addition to revisiting themes, settings, plot patterns and character constellations, popular fiction — i.e. genres such as fantasy, science fiction and romance novels — in particular also tends to feature recurring linguistic patterns. These can be revealed by a corpus-driven approach that identifies statistically significant recurring lexico-syntactic constructions, which give rise to phraseological motifs. This article exemplifies what corpus-driven approaches can contribute to genre theory by drawing upon corpora of English and French romance fiction. A corpus-driven approach makes it possible to identify characteristics of a genre-specific ‘language of intimacy’ as well as stylistic differences between English and French romance novels.
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While reiterations of typical stages of the love plot (e.g. the first meeting, the first date, obstacles of various kinds, a growing awareness of mutual attraction, the declaration of love) and of popular patterns like the ‘from enemies to lovers’ trope are easy to spot, recurring features on the linguistic level are usually more elusive. Yet these can be revealed by corpus-linguistic approaches.
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A contrastive analysis of data elicited from large corpora of English and French romance fiction makes it possible to see how RLCs [recurring lexico-syntactic constructions] related to physical contact are integrated into their immediate textual contexts. The contrastive nature of the analysis also allows us to distinguish between features of the depiction of physical intimacy that are typical of the genre, on the one hand, and those that may result from stylistic preferences in English versus French romance novels on the other hand. To put it differently, the data elicited by our corpus-driven approach makes it possible to test literary historians’ observations on distinct stylistic traditions.
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Our corpus-driven approach has revealed which co-occurring units and selected collocations are highly frequent involving lexical pivots that are, in turn, specific in the romance corpus (e.g. love, sex, guilt, jealousy, make love, fall in love, have sex, stab of guilt, pang of jealousy). Pursuing a contrastive approach, we adopted the same steps with French lexical units (amour, sexe, culpabilité, jalousie, etc.) and then compared the distributions of co-occurring units (faire l’amour, tomber amoureux, etc.), while observing contextual variation (collocates and constructions [...]).
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The data from our corpora has revealed a statistically significant over-representation of to have sex (307 occurrences, LLR 255.79) and to make love (429 occurrences, LLR 262.31) in English romance novels, with a total of 736 occurrences for these two RLCs. In French romance fiction, there are 477 occurrences of the equivalent expression faire l’amour (LLR 191.55).
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In short, as our results show, in expressions referring to physical intimacy, adverbs of time are more frequent in the English corpus, while adverbs of manner are more common in the French corpus. The latter, as hinted at above, are particularly interesting for an analysis from the point of view of gender studies because they often flesh out the ways in which the relations between the lovers are presented. These adverbs constitute syntagmatic extensions of the collocational nucleus, thus forming statistically significant motifs in the two languages, but fulfilling different discursive functions: a narrative DF in English (focusing on the frequency of sexual encounters) and a descriptive DF in French (elaborating on the manner of making love), which may implicitly convey information on the way the novel conceptualises gender relations.
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Emotional intensity is a further vital ingredient of romance fiction, which correlates with a tendency in both English and French to use complex constructions that stress this intensity by means of images. The images used in English (stabbing, waves), which give rise to constructions like feel a N1 stab|wave… of + N2 affect, seem ideally suited for conveying a “general emphasis on strong feelings” (Gymnich & Dyka, 2020: 181), which is deemed typical of the genre. The frequency of these constructions, however, suggests that they have congealed into clichés. Moreover, negative emotions like anxiety and jealousy are drawn upon to create a certain amount of suspense in a genre whose plots are generally very predictable and formulaic.
Here's the abstract:
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