Since their local separation in the 18th century, the French language variety in Canadian Québec (FQ) and the varieties spoken in the French Hexagon (FH) developed independently. As a result, their literary texts are marked by linguistic singularities especially present in the lexicon. Meanwhile in the digital literary studies, innovative methods as frequency and distribution analyses offer new approaches to receive a better view on the applied lexicon in literary texts.
Given a bilateral corpus of FH and FQ literary prose texts, the poster presents a pilot study that can be located at the intersection of the two literatures by comparing the frequency and distribution singularities in the lexicon of the two French varieties. It focuses on verbs that semantically represent potentially linguistic processes (mental processes included). The aim is to detect local, temporal trends and lexical particularities in the use of these verbs comparing the two francophone literatures.