Investigating the stylistic relevance of adjective and verb simile markers

Similes are figures of speech in which the similarities as well as the differences between two or more semantically unrelated entities are expressed by means of a linguistic unit. This unit, also called marker, can either be a morpheme, a word or a phrase. Since similes rely on comparison, they occur in several languages of the world. Depending on the marker used and of the semantic or structural nuances it introduces, two main simile classifications have been proposed. From her study of images built on figures of resemblance in Baudelaire's poetry, Bouverot (1969) distinguishes between type I and type II similes. Whereas type I similes are denoted by a finite number of comparatives, prepositions or conjunctions which traditionally convey a comparison, type II similes are observed after a verb or an adjective which semantically contains the idea of similitude or difference. Leech and Short (2007) propose a stricter distinction and separate conventional similes of the form “X is like Y” from quasi-similes which revolve around all other linguistic constructions. This partition seems to take into account the fact that some simile markers are often preferred in a particular language. For example, „like‟ in English or „comme‟ in French are often presented as the prototypical simile markers and are more frequently used than the other markers. Similes play an important role in literary texts not only as rhetorical devices and as figures of speech but also because of their evocative power, their aptness for description and the relative ease with which they can be combined with other figures of speech (Israel et al. 2004). Detecting all types of simile constructions in a particular text therefore seems crucial when analysing the style of an author. Few research studies however have been dedicated to the study of less prominent simile markers in fictional prose and their relevance for stylistic studies. The present paper studies the frequency of adjective and verb simile markers in a corpus of British and French novels in order to determine which ones are really informative and worth including in a stylistic analysis. Furthermore, are those adjectives and verb simile markers used differently in both languages? 2 Adjective and verb simile markers