Investigating Syntactic Simplicity in Popular Fiction

While popular fiction has been amply discussed by literary critics and cultural studies scholars, the language of popular fiction has been relatively under-researched. Recent work in stylistics (see, for example, Mahlberg and McIntyre 2011, Montoro 2012) has begun to build on early studies by scholars such as Nash (1990). I investigate the commonly held assumption that writers of popular fiction are less linguistically versatile than literary authors and that this is likely to be reflected in the syntactic structures of their writing. Elsewhere, Montoro and McIntyre (2019) have tested this hypothesis by looking at subordinating conjunctions as markers of complexity and by considering whether these are more prevalent in serious fiction than in popular fiction. Montoro and McIntyre (2019) conclude that serious fiction cannot be said to be more syntactically complex on the basis of that measure alone; instead, syntactic complexity appears to be realised at phrasal rather than clausal level. In this paper, I further that investigation by analysing two corpora which prototypically illustrate genres associated with popular fiction: Chick Lit and Vampire literature. I expand the analysis by Montoro ad McIntyre (2019) and focus on the Noun Phrase to further test the premise that syntactic complexity works at phrasal rather than at clausal level.