Abstract
The paper explores the recurrent linguistic patterns in English and Czech children's narrative fiction and their textual functions. It combines contrastive phraseological research with corpus-driven methods, taking frequency lists and n-grams as its starting points.
The analysis focuses on the domains of time, space and body language. The results reveal register-specific recurrent linguistic patterns which play a role in the constitution of the fictional world of children's literature, specifying its temporal and spatial characteristics, and relating to the communication among the protagonists.
The method used also points out typological differences between the patterns employed in the two languages, and the limitations of the n-gram based approach.