Alcohol and tobacco consumption in english and french novels since the 1950s: A corpus-stylistic analysis

Abstract

The article explores references to the consumption of alcohol and tobacco in English and French fiction since the 1950s from a corpus-stylistic and corpus-driven vantage point. The extraction of Recurrent Lexico-syntactic Trees (RLTs) related to alcohol and tobacco consumption from a corpus containing texts of five different literary genres (crime, romance, science fiction, fantasy and general fiction [GEN]) served as a starting point for a comparison of the most productive RLTs in both languages and an analysis of their textual functions. The cigarette script and the drink script in English and French fiction are analysed with respect to their diegetic, social and affective as well as identification functions. © The Author(s) 2020.