In this contribution we take a keyword approach (Scott and Tribble 2006) to exploring the part key ‘descriptive’ adverbs play in the creation of literariness (литературность, Jakobson 1921) in English novels compared with their functional equivalents in French novels. To our knowledge, little research has been done on the specific contribution made by key adverbs and adverbial phrases in fiction as well as on how they are translated (apart from a few stray remarks in translation textbooks). In this chapter we aim to a) quantify the key adverbs used in English and French fiction, b) investigate the ways in which selected adverbs contribute to conventional discursive patterns (‘motifs’) found in fiction, and c) analyse French functional equivalents of English key adverbs found in an English-French parallel corpus. We hypothesize also that adverbs of manner (*ly or *ment) tend to co-occur with certain semantic verb classes (speech, gesture, cognition, movement, communication and test this assumption by applying statistical methods to large English and French comparable corpora.