Abstract: This study is an exploratory investigation into phraseological items specific to the fiction section of the Corpus de référence du français contemporain and to a large corpus of English-language post-war novels. Its overall aim is three-fold: first, to show how the subjective impression of “literariness” arising from fictional works is at least partly based on the statistically significant use of highly specific words and lexico-grammatical configurations; second, to attempt a broad classification of key words and patterns; third, to illustrate the fiction-specific patterns formed by the key words soleil and sun. Analysis proceeded in three steps: 1) key word analysis; 2) generation of all two-to-five word strings from the corpora; 3) contrastive analysis of multi-word strings and collocations associated with the key words soleil and sun. Results indicate that post-war fiction is characterized by the dense use of specific sets of key words and key patterns, such as multi-word strings (ne pouvait détacher son regard), phrase frames (personal pronoun + en + être + là + de + possessive pronoun + réflexions / pensées / interrogations/… + quand / lorsque) and collocations (le soleil déclinant).
