Literary Style, Corpus Stylistic, and Lexico-Grammatical Narrative Patterns: Toward the Concept of Literary Motifs

Abstract

In this chapter we survey previous research and present the methodology employed in the present book. We begin by outlining work done in stylistics (e.g. Barthes 1966; Leech and Short 2007), corpus stylistics (Stubbs 2005; Fischer-Starcke 2010; Mahlberg 2013) and “textometrie” (textometry, Brunet 1981) to characterize the style used by various authors (e.g. Flaubert, Proust, Dickens, Austen). Next, the focus shifts to the scarcity of research in fiction-specific lexico-grammatical patterns based on large corpora, which will be at the center of the present volume. We then proceed to defining said patterns (often called “motifs,” e.g. by Longree and Mellet 2013 and Legallois 2006 in the French literature on the subject), followed by differentiating them from other types of phraseological units. The chapter concludes by underscoring the contribution that introducing the notion of “motif” makes to linguistics and literary studies research.