Phraseology in the novel

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Ludwig Fesenmeier; Professorin Dr. Marion Gymnich; Professor Dr. Dirk Siepmann
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics ; General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2016 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 281272751

The chief goal of this project is to set up a corpus-driven structural and functional typology of lexico-syntactic constructions in English, French and German 20th century novels, the novel being the most widely read literary genre. This typology will be used for two types of comparison:a) a comparison between high literature and popular fiction (French paralittérature, German Trivialliteratur; science fiction; detective fiction; romance fiction)b) a comparison between the stylistic practices found in different literary traditions The first stage of the project will involve the automatic extraction of statistically significant fiction-specific constructions from the novelistic corpus, using newspaper and science texts as reference corpora. The constructions thus obtained will then be subjected to detailed analysis with a view to determining the extent to which they are instrumental in the construction of literary texts, and a typology of relevant constructions will be set up. The linguistic analysis, which will comprise the semantic, syntactic and discourse levels, will be combined with a literary-stylistic comparative analysis that will take account of several novelistic genres. The aim is to lay the groundwork for a lexico-grammar of fiction-specific constructions, with implications for linguistics, literary and contrastive stylistics, and translation studies.The project is interdisciplinary in nature, bringing together linguists and literary scholars and integrating phraseology, stylistics, genre theory, corpus linguistics and natural language processing. Both in terms of its research focus (phraseology in the novel) and its methodology (corpus-driven linguistics), it falls within the larger domain of the digital humanities.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: France, Poland, Switzerland
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Peter Blumenthal; John Desmond Gallagher; Professor Dr. Francois Maniez; Professorin Dr. Teresa Muryn; Dr. Malgorzata Niziolek; Dr. Iva Novakova; Professor Dr. Gilles Philippe