English Text Construction - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2010

Visual poems employ the materiality of language (such as letter- and word-forms and page layouts), to help develop their meanings, thereby synthesizing visual and verbal cues. To discuss this multimodal genre, I posit a framework based on cognitive research of fictive motion, frames, simulation, and blending. I apply this framework to two works by Canadian poet bpNichol to illustrate some of the central cognitive processes and connections required to synthesize and understand them, something previous theoretical positions have struggled with. My analysis illustrates that these apparently simplistic poems are far more complex than we realize. The posited framework can easily extend beyond visual poetry to other multimodal genres, such as comics and advertising, and can also contribute to discussions of genre, style, and other issues of form in literature.

This paper considers the use of alternativity and stance in dramatic and poetic discourse. After a brief look at negation as a phenomenon based on alternative mental spaces, I show how negation can be viewed as ‘intersubjective’. The paper then looks at the intersubjective aspects of negation in a scene from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him). In the next sections, the poetic style of Wislawa Szymborska comes under investigation. In particular, the discussion highlights mechanisms such as frame-evocation, counterfactuality, causation, blending, and the alternativity of or. I argue throughout that the primary role of negation and alternativity in dramatic and poetic discourse is making available uncommunicated mental spaces and construals which are then used in the resulting interpretation.

This paper argues that literary modernism can be productively understood as a reflection on what happens when joint attention is frustrated in its operation. Experimental fictions of the early twentieth century frequently dramatize problems of joint attention that can be traced to the ultimate relation between author, reader, and text. Analysis of these dramatizations demonstrates the importance of this joint attentional trope, and suggests a fresh reading of the famous “phantom table” in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

On the basis of a case study of The Book of Evidence and The Sea, this paper looks at the linguistic means through which at different levels distance is created in the fiction of John Banville. In addition to more or less ‘local’ but frequent instances where the first-person narrator’s own discourse is metatextually commented on, or another’s discourse is evoked from his perspective, distancing effects are to be found at the broader levels of the situation of discourse, as in the case of the fictive address of judge and jury in The Book of Evidence, and of the narrator’s identity and perspective, as in The Sea, where the narrator zooms out to take an outside perspective on his own vantage point.

In this contribution, a mental space analysis model is presented to conceptualize and explain voice intertwining in journalistic texts. News text genres abound with clearly recognizable representations of source discourse, such as direct and indirect speech. In addition, blended representation types can be described, such as free indirect speech and implicit viewpoint, in which voices of journalist and source are less easy to discern. Comparison of various news texts concerned with a particular criminal case shows that news reports have a preference for direct or indirect speech and avoid the intertwined type of free indirect speech; by contrast, in feature stories and opinion contributions free indirect speech is not uncommon. Even free indirect thought, stemming from fictional genres, appears to be possible in these subgenres. Finally, blending of journalist and source voices is present in references to characters and events. Analysis of mental spaces attributed to sources in various news genres helps to explain how the intertwining of voices is established by linguistic form. Consequences for theory on functions and effects of source representation are discussed.

In this paper I discuss a form of metaphorical creativity that involves the introduction of ‘unrealistic’ scenarios for rhetorical purposes in expository and argumentative texts. I primarily account for the nature and function of this form of creativity in terms of Fauconnier and Turner’s (2002) notion of Blending, with some references to Conceptual Metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999). I show that a proper account of the textual extracts I analyse needs to include the role of genre in the construction and interpretation of texts, and allow for differences in meaning construction between writers and readers, and between different groups of readers.

Following Blending Theory, this article analyses a novel metaphor LIFE IS MUSIC which formed a leitmotif of Daniel Barenboim’s BBC Reith Lectures of 2006. The main focus is on the means and techniques employed by Barenboim, and his use of “verbo-musical” metaphors in particular. Because it goes beyond verbo-pictorial modes of representation, the proposed study of verbo-musical metaphors in a dynamically evolving discourse constitutes a new contribution not only to studies of multimodal metaphor in actual language use, but also to debates on conceptual nature of metaphor, “(metaphorical) thinking for speaking”, and language and cognition.

This study examines metaphorical expressions in American radio news magazines appearing in two linguistic forms: NP is a NP and It’s like NP. It integrates Blending Theory (Fauconnier & Turner 2002) with a usage-based approach to grammatical constructions (Goldberg 1995, 2006;Tomasello 2003, and Croft 2001) and analyzes the forms within their dynamic discourse context in terms of noun phrase accessibility (Chafe 1980, 1994; Givón 1983; Ariel 1988) and grounding (Langacker 1999, Oakley & Coulson 2008). The findings indicate that the functions of the grammatical constructions used in the metaphorical expressions were directly related to the non-metaphorical uses of the constructions and that the analysis of the ongoing discourse was essential to understanding the form-meaning pairings inherent in the expressions.