CONSTRUCTING THE FANTASTIC: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF MAGIC IN YA FAIRY TALES

Abstract

This article explores the linguistic construction of magic in two contemporary young adult fairy-tale texts – Naomi Novik’s Uprooted and Leigh Bardugo’s The Language of Thorns – through the combined lens of semantic field theory, corpus stylistics, and narratological analysis. The study moves beyond thematic interpretation to focus on how magic functions as a semantically unstable element, shaped by recurrent lexical and grammatical patterns.Drawing on a custom-built corpus of both texts (over 255,000 tokens), the authors identify and interpret patterns where magic appears as an animate force, instrumental tool, personal attribute, or source of danger. These roles emerge through verbs like snarl, flow, use, or own, and through noun and adjective collocates such as magic blood, terrible magic, or own magic. The findings highlight how linguistic texture itself becomes a vehicle for sustaining narrative ambiguity and emotional complexity in contemporary YA fantasy.By combining quantitative linguistic mapping with close textual reading, the article demonstrates that magic plays a key narrative and affective role, particularly in how it encodes ambiguity, instability, and ethical tension.The analysis draws on Tzvetan Todorov’s theory of the fantastic, framing magic as a force that sustains hesitation between natural and supernatural explanations. While acknowledging alternative genre frameworks like Farah Mendlesohn’s taxonomy of fantasy, the authors argue that the linguistic portrayal of magic in both texts supports a Todorovian reading rooted in semantic and emotional uncertainty. Ultimately, the study shows how language itself, through patterns of collocation and syntactic framing, contributes to the construction of the fantastic and invites further comparative research into how YA fairy-tale fiction represents themes of power, transformation, and resistance.