ABSTRACT
While popular fiction has been amply discussed by literary critics and cultural studies scholars, the language of popular fiction has been relatively under-researched. When attention is devoted to the language of popular novels, literary critics and readers often characterise it as ‘easy to read’ and this easiness tends to be equated with a kind of syntactic simplicity which separates it from Literature with a capital ‘L’. This chapter investigates such claims of syntactic simplicity and focuses specifically on one linguistic unit where it appears to be particularly prevalent, namely the Noun Phrase. This chapter uses a corpus stylistics methodology to analyse two corpora of contemporary popular fiction (Chick Lit and Modern Vampire novels) and concludes by confirming that phrasal simplicity in relation to one component of the Noun Phrase (the post-modifying of-phrase) is indeed a characteristic of popular writing.
