English Text Construction - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2012

We suggest that the impact of metaphoric language does not depend entirely on the conceptual metaphor that is evoked, nor on the form the metaphoric language takes, but also on the steps involved in evoking a given metaphor. This is especially apparent in minimalist poetry. Readers are given hints, cultural conventions, or no guidance at all, on how to fill in missing metaphoric domains and mappings. We place minimalist metaphors at the “effortful” end of the cline proposed by Stockwell (1992), and suggest that the other end can be associated with maximalist metaphors, which corral the reader into a highly specific interpretation. The degree of minimalism or maximalism depends on the specific mappings that are linguistically indicated, the degree of conventionalization of the metaphor, and reliance on cultural background knowledge.

Round brackets undergo a process of stylistic re-evaluation that coincides with the development of Austen’s literary career (from pernicious elements that break the perspicuity of the Enlightened sentence to positively appraised markers of spoken spontaneity and emotion). Through a corpus-based study of her Juvenilia, letters and mature novels, this paper examines Austen’s use of round brackets with a view to exploring whether the contemporaneous salience of the punctuation mark may have had an impact on Austen’s style.

This article describes a corpus-assisted study of some socio-political keywords (in a similar sense to Raymond Williams’ ‘cultural keywords’ 1983 [1976]), of newspaper reporting between 1998 and 2007, when Tony Blair’s New Labour government was in power. We approach the discovery of socio-political keywords via the analysis of statistical keywords. Reducing a long list of statistical keywords to a shortlist of socio-politically significant keywords is inevitably complex, and the article explains the process used here. We demonstrate that certain lexemes gain currency in relatively short historical periods and take on political importance in addition to their everyday meaning. Combining corpus linguistics with critical stylistic analysis, we explore the usage of five important socio-political keywords of the New Labour period.

This paper develops the framework of telling and knowledge operators earlier proposed for distinctions of mood and sentence types in the lexical verb (Davies 2006) to apply to non-inferential epistemic modal verbs. It consists of two parts: the first offers some background to the approach and sets out the formal model used; the second applies this model to two modal verbs. It considers the meanings of the modal verbs may (not) and might (not) as used in four different English sentence-types, with a view to assessing the different degrees of ‘loading’ towards a positive belief that they convey. Different kinds of meanings are suggested, one to do with degrees of a speaker’s commitment to what s/he is saying (‘presentational meaning’), and another to do with attitudes projected, by the speaker through the constructions s/he uses, onto the addressee(s) in a developing text (‘textual meaning’). In the case of the two modal verbs studied here, the textual meaning is said to be contrastive in relation to the speaker’s own ‘presentational meaning’.

A paradigm gap has long separated the fields of World Englishes and Learner Englishes: they have mainly been dealt with separately and very little consideration has been given to the features that they might share. Recently, however, Nesselhauf (2009) has highlighted that some features thought to be variety-specific are in fact shared by World and Learner varieties. This paper examines their use of the high-frequency verb make in samples of corpora of student writing of four World Englishes, four Learner Englishes and a control corpus of English as a Native Language (ENL). This case study shows that, quantitatively, the World and Learner varieties are mainly characterized by heterogeneity, while qualitatively, a number of similarities distinguish them from ENL.