Project title - Acronym

Phraseology of the novel - PhraseoRom

ANR-15-FRAL-0009

Coordinators

  • Prof. Dr. Iva NOVAKOVA (Lidilem, Université Grenoble Alpes) ;
  • Prof. Dr. Dirk SIEPMANN (English department, University of Osnabrück, Germany)

Fields of study

  • Linguistics;
  • Phraseology;
  • Corpus linguistics;
  • Natural language processing;
  • Literary studies and stylistics;
  • Text linguistics;
  • Contrastive linguistics;
  • Translation studies

Project duration

2016-2020

Abstract

The main aim of the project is to develop a structural and functional typology of lexico-syntactic constructions (LSCs) which are specific to German, British and French twentieth-century novels. On the basis of this typology two types of comparison will be made:

  • between ‘high’ literature and popular literature
  • between the stylistic practices encountered in the literary traditions of the UK, Germany and France

In a first step, statistical methods will be used to identify the lexico-syntactic constructions (LSCs) specific to literary texts in comparison with a reference corpus of newspaper and academic texts. This will be followed by an investigation into the extent to which these LSCs play a role in constructing meaning in literary texts. A general semantic, syntactic and textual analysis of novelistic fiction will be combined with a stylistic analysis of individual literary genres and texts. The results of these investigations will make it possible to lay the foundations of a ‘lexico-grammar’ of phraseological expressions, which can then be incorporated into contrastive linguistics and stylistics as well as into translation studies.
The project is interdisciplinary and sits at the intersection of linguistics and literary studies; it has special relevance for phraseology, stylistics, genre theory, corpus linguistics and natural language processing.
The chosen research topic (the phraseology of the novel) and the corpus-driven methodology (following Habert 2005) used situate the project firmly within the digital humanities.