The balance between quantitative and qualitative literary stylistics: How the method of "motifs" can help

Dominique Legallois (1) , Thierry Charnois , Meri Larjavaara

1 CLESTHIA - CLESTHIA - Langage, systèmes, discours - EA 7345

D. Legallois, T. Charnois and M. Larjavaara study 60 novels by twelve 19th century French authors, aiming to show the complementarity between a stylistics of identification (based on stylometry techniques), and a stylistics of characterization (adopting a qualitative approach). The two stylistics belong to very different traditions, but by taking motifs as units of analysis, it is possible to identify some of the lexico-grammatical patterns typical of each author. The paper presents in detail the method of extraction of patterns and proposes many examples of stylistic features, especially among the novelists Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, and Gaboriau. Very often, these features have not been identified by traditional stylistics.

Domaines: Linguistique

Dominique Legallois, Thierry Charnois, Meri Larjavaara. The balance between quantitative and qualitative literary stylistics: How the method of "motifs" can help. Legallois, Charnois, Larjavaara. The Grammar of Genres and styles, De Gruyter Mouton, 2018, 9783110589689. ⟨10.1515/9783110595864-008⟩. ⟨hal-03546266⟩