Lexicologie et phraséologie du roman contemporain : quelques pistes pour le français et l’anglais

This study is an exploratory investigation into phraseological items specific to the fiction section of the Corpus de référence du français contemporain and to a large corpus of English-language post-war novels. Its overall aim is three-fold: first, to show how the subjective impression of “literariness” arising from fictional works is at least partly based on the statistically significant use of highly specific words and lexico-grammatical configurations; second, to attempt a broad classification of key words and patterns; third, to illustrate the fiction-specific patterns formed by the key words soleil and sun. Analysis proceeded in three steps: 1) key word analysis; 2) generation of all two-to-five word strings from the corpora; 3) contrastive analysis of multi-word strings and collocations associated with the key words soleil and sun. Results indicate that post-war fiction is characterized by the dense use of specific sets of key words and key patterns, such as multi-word strings (ne pouvait détacher son regard), phrase frames (personal pronoun + en + être + là + de + possessive pronoun + réflexions / pensées / interrogations/… + quand / lorsque) and collocations (le soleil déclinant).