In this chapter we survey previous research and present the methodology employed in the present book. We begin by outlining work done in stylistics (e.g. Barthes 1966, Leech & Short 2007), corpus stylistics (Stubbs 2005, Fischer-Starcke 2010, Mahlberg 2013) and ‘textométrie’ (Brunet 1981) to characterize the style used by various authors (e.g. Flaubert, Proust, Dickens, Austen). Next, the focus shifts to the scarcity of research in fiction-specific lexico-grammatical patterns based on large corpora, which will be at the centre of the present volume. We then proceed to defining said patterns (often called ‘motifs’, e.g., by Longrée & Mellet 2013 and Legallois 2006 in the French literature on the subject), followed by differentiating them from other types of phraseological units. The chapter concludes by underscoring the contribution that introducing the notion of ‘motif’ makes to linguistics and literary studies research.