Linguistic Approaches to Literature

Author Representations in Literary Reading investigates the role of the author in the mind of the reader. It is the first book-length empirical study on generated author inferences by readers of literature. It bridges the gap between theories which hold that the author is irrelevant and those that give him prominence. By combining insights and methods from both cognitive psychology and literary theory, this book contributes to a better understanding of how readers process literary texts and what role their assumptions about an author play. A series of experiments demonstrate that readers generate author inferences during the process of reading, which they use to create an image of the text’s author. The findings suggest that interpretations about the author play a pivotal role in the literary reading process. This book is relevant to scholars and students in all areas of the cognitive sciences, including literary studies and psychology.

This is the first book to present an account of literary meaning and effects drawing on our best understanding of mind and language in the form of a Cognitive Grammar. The contributors provide exemplary analyses of a range of literature from science fiction, dystopia, absurdism and graphic novels to the poetry of Wordsworth, Hopkins, Sassoon, Balassi, and Dylan Thomas, as well as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Barrett Browning, Whitman, Owen and others. The application of Cognitive Grammar allows the discussion of meaning, translation, ambience, action, reflection, multimodality, empathy, experience and literariness itself to be conducted in newly valid ways. With a Foreword by the creator of Cognitive Grammar, Ronald Langacker, and an Afterword by the cognitive scientist Todd Oakley, the book represents the latest advance in literary linguistics, cognitive poetics and literary critical practice.

This book represents the state of the art in cognitive stylistics a rapidly expanding field at the interface between linguistics, literary studies and cognitive science. The twelve chapters combine linguistic analysis with insights from cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics in order to arrive at innovative accounts of a range of literary and textual phenomena. The chapters cover a variety of literary texts, periods, and genres, including poetry, fictional and non-fictional narratives, and plays. Some of the chapters provide new approaches to phenomena that have a long tradition in literary and linguistic studies (such as humour, characterisation, figurative language, and metre), others focus on phenomena that have not yet received adequate attention (such as split-selves phenomena, mind style, and spatial language). This book is relevant to students and scholars in a wide range of areas within linguistics, literary studies and cognitive science.

The volume presents Louw's Contextual Prosodic Theory from its beginnings to its newest applications. It journeys from delexicalisation and relexicalisation into Semantic Prosody and then to the heart of its contextual requirements within collocation and the thinking of J.R. Firth. Once there, it moves much of Firth’s and Malinowski’s thinking into a computational method based upon the ability of language to govern and analyse itself using collocation to plot its scope and limits. With the assistance of analytic philosophy, it parts logic (grammar) from metaphysics (vocabulary) along the lines of a non-computational formula of Bertrand Russell, and so falsifies the major premise of the Vienna Circle using its own central tenet: the Principle of Verification. Having arrived at corpus-derived subtext (the semantic aura of grammar strings, as distinguished from Semantic Prosody), the second half of the book proceeds to verify the theory on Slavic languages. The focus is on the poet Alexander Pushkin, whose authorial intention becomes computationally recoverable. Prose is handled on samples authored by David Lodge, where authorial (in)sincerity (Louw 1993) is viewed on a cline of inspiration and quality of discourse. Other applications in the volume include studies on translation, negotiation, humour, and the reception of CPT.

Situated among fields (applied linguistics, creative writing studies, writing studies), this book empirically explores the language of writers in contexts of learning externalized in literary genres. At its core, this book features linguistic and thematic analysis of the writing and reflections of adults who experienced what they usually described as meaningful CW in university coursework, sometimes in science and research-focused courses where they might not have expected to compose a literary genre. In addition to synthesizing empirical studies that in total included more than 3,500 participants, chapters present new research involving about 400 more. This book is meant to be substantial in its goal of systematically organizing what is known about CW’s relationship to writers: in terms of feelings of engagement, gains in content knowledge, and revelations about oneself and others.

Directions in Empirical Literary Studies is on the cutting edge of empirical studies and is a much needed volume. It both widens the scope of empirical studies and looks at them from an intercultural perspective by bringing together renowned scholars from the fields of philosophy, sociology, psychology, linguistics and literature, all focusing on how empirical studies have impacted these different areas. Theoretical issues are discussed and solid methods are presented. Some chapters also show the relation between empirical studies and new technology, examining developments in computer science and corpus linguistics. This book takes a global perspective, with contributors from many different countries, both senior and junior researchers. Broad in scope and interdisciplinary in nature, it contributes with the state-of-the-art developments in the field.

Experiencing Fictional Worlds is not only the title of this book, but a challenge to reveal exactly what makes the “experience” of literature. This volume presents contributions drawing upon a range of theories and frameworks based on the text-as-world metaphor. This text-world approach is fruitfully applied to a wide variety of text types, from poetry to genre-specific prose to children’s story-books.

This book investigates how fictional worlds are built and updated, how context affects the conceptualisation of text-worlds, and how emotions are elicited in these processes. The diverse analyses of this volume apply and develop approaches such as Text World Theory, reader-response studies, and pedagogical stylistics, among other broader cognitive and linguistic frameworks. Experiencing Fictional Worlds aligns with other cutting-edge research on language conceptualisation in fields including cognitive linguistics, stylistics, narratology, and literary criticism. This volume will be relevant to anyone with interests in language and literature.

Free Indirect Style (FIS) is a linguistic technique that defies the logic of human subjectivity by enabling readers to directly observe the subjective experiences of third-person characters. This book consolidates the existing literary-linguistic scholarship on FIS into a theory that is based around one of its most important effects: consciousness representation. Modernist narratives exhibit intensified formal experimentation and a heightened concern with characters’ conscious experience, and this provides an ideal context for exploring FIS and its implications for character consciousness. This book focuses on three novels that are central to the Modernist canon: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and James Joyce’s Ulysses. It applies the revised theory of FIS in close semantic analyses of the language in these narratives and combines stylistics with literary criticism, linking interpretations with linguistic features in distinct manifestations of the style.

The books we’ve read, the films we’ve seen, the stories we’ve heard - and just as importantly the ones we haven’t – form an integral part of our identity. Recognising a reference to a text can result in feelings of pleasure, expertise and even smugness; being lost as to a reference’s possible significance can lead to alienation from a text or conversation. Intertextuality in Practice offers readers a cognitively-grounded framework for hands-on analysis of intertextuality, both in written texts and spoken discourse. The book offers a historical overview of existing research, highlighting that most of this work focuses on what intertextuality ‘is’ conceptually, rather than how it can be identified, described and analysed. Drawing on research from literary criticism, neuroscience, linguistics and sociology, this book proposes a cognitive stylistic approach, presenting the ‘narrative interrelation framework’ as a way of operationalising the concept of intertextuality to enable close practical analysis.

For the first time, the works on stylistics by one of the most brilliant linguists of our times are collected in a single volume. This book highlights the evolution of John Sinclair’s theories and insights from studies on language teaching through detailed analyses of text and discourse, and into his later works on corpus stylistics. More specifically, Part I focuses on how theory can inform teaching practice. Part II is more directed towards linguistic analyses of specific texts and provides practical bases for stylistic approaches. In Part III, Sinclair’s contributions to discourse analysis shed light on ways of looking and understanding literature. Written in his crisp clear, straightforward style, this book demonstrates Sinclair’s explicit concern for more systematic approaches to the integration of language and literature and shows why his works on stylistics have been both reference and inspiration to students, language and literature teachers and researchers over many decades.