Abstract
In this paper, we propose a corpus-driven study of “fiction words”, a concept introduced by Angenot (Poétique 33: 74–89, 1978) which denotes a type of lexical coinage specific to the science fiction genre and that furnishes an interesting key to interpreting the peculiarities of the science fiction imaginary. More precisely, the article presents a comparative study between an American English and a French corpus of novels from the 1990s to determine the extent, if any, to which these two different literary traditions share a common background of fictional references, mixing elements that come from various “xenoencyclopedias” (Saint-Gelais in L’Empire du pseudo: Modernités de la Science-fiction. Nota Bene, Québec, 1999). Focusing on two comparable sets of randomly drawn fiction words, we first examine how these words are built morphologically and to which semantic fields they belong. Next, we compare syntactic environments, in the process utilizing clues extracted via the RLTs (recurrent lexico-syntactic trees) technique. Both approaches help us understand the functional role these fiction words play in the SF genre and to explain through the twin lenses of the French and English corpora the great similarities observable in how they are deployed.
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Notes
- 1.
The corpus was composed by Judith Chambre; she brought together the various English and French titles of science fiction novels from the 1990s by taking into account the diversity of subgenres and the representativeness of the selected books in the field of science fiction.
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- 3.
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- 6.
Larousse online, Petit Robert and Wiktionnaire for French, Collins English Dictionary, Oxford English Dictionary and Wiktionary for English.
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- 9.
For an example of applying a complex semantic grid to a science fiction corpus, see Chapter 7 by Goossens et al. in this volume.
- 10.
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/sf_megatext (consulted on January 2018).
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Annex
Authors in the French corpus: Ayerdhal, Barberi, Berthelot, Bordage, Brussolo, Colin and Gaborit, Curval, Dantec, Deff, Di Rollo, Dunyach, Fontana, Genefort, Lehman, Léourier, Ligny, Pagel, Pelot, Wagner, Walther, Werber.
Authors in the English corpus: Asaro, Asimov, Barnes, Bear, Brin, Bujold, Butler, Cherryh, Crichton, Goonan, Haldeman, Kress, McCaffrey, Moon, Pohl, Robinson, Scott, Silverberg, Simmons, Stephenson, Gibson and Sterling, Sterling, Swanwick, Vinge, Williams, Willis.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Judith Chambre, who helped in the selection of the English and French novels of the corpus.
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Gonon, L., Kraif, O. (2020). French and American Science Fiction During the Nineties: A Contrastive Study of Fiction Words and Phraseology. In: Novakova, I., Siepmann, D. (eds) Phraseology and Style in Subgenres of the Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23744-8_6
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