Seeking to combine a corpus-based approach and literary genre theory, we use recurrent lexico-syntactic constructions to examine whether these provide hints at differences between contemporary English and German romance novels. We have chosen to focus on constructions in two fields in the romance genre, which readers expect due to the genre’s ‘emotional core’: falling and being in love as well as intimacy. In addition, we draw upon those constructions as a starting point for exploring whether conventions of romance fiction have had an impact on other genres (specifically general fiction, historical novels, crime fiction, fantasy, and science fiction) in the two languages. This question was motivated by the hypothesis that the romance plot has spread across different genres, which was put forward by Roach (2016).
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