Cognitive Grammar in Literature

270 Pages·2014·3.05 MB·English

by  Chloe Harrison

Cognitive Grammar in Literature
Linguistic Approaches to Literature (LAL)
Linguistic Approaches to Literature (LAL) provides an international forum for
researchers who believe that the application of linguistic methods leads to a deeper
and more far-reaching understanding of many aspects of literature. The emphasis
will be on pragmatic approaches intersecting with areas such as experimental
psychology, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, cognitive linguistics,
stylistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, rhetoric, and philosophy.
For an overview of all books published in this series, please see
http://benjamins.com/catalog/lal
Editors
Sonia Zyngier Joanna Gavins
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro University of Sheffield
Advisory Editorial Board
Douglas Biber Arthur C. Graesser Keith Oatley
Northern Arizona University University of Memphis University of Toronto
Marisa Bortolussi Frank Hakemulder Willie van Peer
University of Alberta Utrecht University University of München
Donald C. Freeman Geoff M. Hall Yeshayahu Shen
University of Southern University of Wales, Swansea Tel Aviv University
California David L. Hoover Mick Short
Richard Gerrig New York University Lancaster University
Stony Brook University Don Kuiken Michael Toolan
Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. University of Alberta University of Birmingham
University of California, Geoffrey N. Leech Reuven Tsur
Santa Cruz Lancaster University Tel Aviv University
Rachel Giora Paisley Livingston Peter Verdonk
Tel Aviv University University of Copenhagen University of Amsterdam
Volume 17
Cognitive Grammar in Literature
Edited by Chloe Harrison, Louise Nuttall, Peter Stockwell and Wenjuan Yuan
Cognitive Grammar
in Literature
Edited by
Chloe Harrison
Louise Nuttall
Peter Stockwell
Wenjuan Yuan
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cognitive Grammar in Literature / Edited by Chloe Harrison, Louise Nuttall, Peter
Stockwell and Wenjuan Yuan.
p. cm. (Linguistic Approaches to Literature, issn 1569-3112 ; v. 17)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Cognitive grammar. 2. Discourse analysis, Literary. 3. Creativity (Linguistics)
4.  Literature--History and criticism. I. Harrison, Chloe, editor.
P165.C638 2014
415--dc23 2013049282
isbn 978 90 272 3404 9 (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 3406 3 (Pb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 7056 6 (Eb)
© 2014 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
Table of contents
List of contributors vii
Acknowledgements xi
Foreword xiii
Ronald W. Langacker
Chapter 1.
Introduction: Cognitive Grammar in literature 1
Chloe Harrison, Louise Nuttall, Peter Stockwell & Wenjuan Yuan
part i. Narrative fiction
Chapter 2.
War, worlds and Cognitive Grammar 19
Peter Stockwell
Chapter 3.
Construal and comics: the multimodal autobiography of Alison Bechdel’s
Fun Home 35
Michael Pleyer & Christian W. Schneider
Chapter 4.
Attentional windowing in David Foster Wallace’s ‘The Soul Is Not a Smithy’ 53
Chloe Harrison
Chapter 5.
Resonant Metaphor in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go 69
Sam Browse
Chapter 6.
Constructing a text world for The Handmaid’s Tale 83
Louise Nuttall
Chapter 7.
Point of view in translation: Lewis Carroll’s Alice in grammatical
wonderlands 101
Elżbieta Tabakowska
vi Cognitive Grammar in Literature
part ii. Studies of poetry
Chapter 8.
Profiling the flight of ‘The Windhover’ 119
Clara Neary
Chapter 9.
Foregrounding the foregrounded: the literariness of Dylan Thomas’s
‘After the funeral’ 133
Anne Päivärinta
Chapter 10.
Conceptual proximity and the experience of war in Siegfried Sassoon’s
‘A Working Party’ 145
Marcello Giovanelli
Chapter 11.
Most and now: tense and aspect in Bálint Balassi’s ‘Áldott szép pünkösdnek’ 161
Mike Pincombe
Chapter 12.
Fictive motion in Wordsworthian nature 177
Wenjuan Yuan
Chapter 13.
The cognitive poetics of if 195
Craig Hamilton
Chapter 14.
Representing the represented: verbal variations on Vincent’s
Bedroom in Arles 213
Alina Kwiatkowska
Afterword: from Cognitive Grammar to systems rhetoric 231
Todd Oakley
References 237
Index 253
List of contributors
Sam Browse is a researcher in the School of English at the University of Sheffield.
His work focuses on developing a text-driven approach to metaphor in discourse,
and his interests encompass literary, political, economic and journalistic forms of
public discourse. He teaches stylistics, discourse analysis and critical theory.
Marcello Giovanelli is a Lecturer in English in Education at the University of
Nottingham. He has teaching and research interests in educational linguistics,
pedagogical stylistics and cognitive poetics. He has written two English language
textbooks and has recently published a monograph on Text World Theory and
Keats’ Poetry (Bloomsbury 2013).
Craig Hamilton is Associate Professor of English Cognitive Linguistics at the
Université de Haute Alsace. He has held previous positions at the University of
California-Irvine, the University of Nottingham, and the University of Paris. He
published the first major article applying Cognitive Grammar to a literary work in
2003, and has since published widely on cognitive linguistic approaches to mod-
ern literature.
Chloe Harrison is Lecturer in Stylistics in the Department of English and Lan-
guages at Coventry University, where she teaches applied linguistics, literary
stylistics and cognitive poetics. Her research work develops a Cognitive Discourse
Grammar of contemporary literature, drawing primarily on Cognitive Grammar
and cognitive linguistics in general.
Alina Kwiatowska is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Łódź. Her
research focuses on aspects of cognitive linguistics, stylistics, and visual semiotics.
During her term as President of the Polish Cognitive Linguistics Association, she
organized a conference on cognitive poetics (2010), and edited the volume Texts
and Minds. Papers in Cognitive Poetics and Rhetoric (Peter Lang 2012). Her most
recent publications explore the interfaces of the visual and the verbal.
Ronald W. Langacker is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San
Diego. He devised and developed Cognitive Grammar, and has published over
20 books and around 200 articles, including the seminal and definitive volumes
in CG. He has also worked on and published extensively on the linguistics of
Uto-Aztecan languages. His work has been translated into several languages and
he has served as President of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association.
viii Cognitive Grammar in Literature
Clara Neary is Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of
Chester, where she teaches both literary and non-literary stylistics, cognitive poet-
ics, media discourse and the linguistics of creativity. Her research publications
include articles on Indian literature in English, life writing, and the stylistics of
global literatures.
Louise Nuttall is a researcher in the School of English at the University of Notting-
ham, where she holds an Arts and Humanities Research Council award. Her work
investigates the presentation and effects of mind-style and characterisation in 20th
century literary prose fiction, drawing on a set of related approaches within cogni-
tive linguistics and cognitive psychology.
Todd Oakley is Professor and Chair of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve
University in Cleveland, Ohio, where he is also a Fellow of the Institute of Origins
and Professor of English. He is the author of From Attention to Meaning: Explora-
tions in Semiotics, Linguistics and Rhetoric (Peter Lang 2009) and co-editor (with
Anders Hougaard) of Mental Spaces in Discourse and Interaction (John Benjamins
2008), as well as 30 research papers and chapters.
Anne Päivärinta is a researcher in the School of Language, Translation and Liter-
ary Studies at the University of Tampere, Finland. Her work focuses on embodi-
ment in Dylan Thomas’s writing, with particular interest in bringing together
Conceptual Metaphor Theory and literary stylistics.
Mike Pincombe is Professor of Tudor and Elizabethan Literature at Newcastle
University. He teaches the literature and critical theory in this period, and also
supervises doctoral work in creative writing. In his research he brings structural
and semiotic analyses to bear on the literary texts and systems of Renaissance lit-
erature. He has published over 60 papers and 9 books and editions, including The
Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature (with Cathy Shrank, Oxford University Press
2009) and Elizabethan Humanism (Longman-Pearson 2001).
Michael Pleyer is a researcher in the Anglistisches Seminar at the Ruprecht-Karls-
Universität in Heidelberg. His work centres on evolutionary linguistics, develop-
mental psychology and cognitive science, with an interest also in multimodal and
popular literary works. He has presented his research in over 20 talks and has
published 11 research papers.
Christian W. Schneider is a researcher in the Anglistisches Seminar at the
Ruprecht-Karls-Universität in Heidelberg. He works in Gothic literature, particu-
larly in an American context, and with a specific focus on popular culture, comic
book studies and the cognitive literary theory of multimodal and graphic texts.
List of contributors ix
Peter Stockwell is Professor of Literary Linguistics at the University of N ottingham.
He is the author and editor of over 70 research papers and more than 20 books,
including Cognitive Poetics (Routledge 2002), The Language and Literature Reader
(with Ron Carter, Routledge 2008), Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading
(Edinburgh University Press 2009) and The Handbook of Stylistics (with Sara
Whiteley, Cambridge University Press 2014).
Elżbieta Tabakowska is UNESCO Professor of Translation Studies and Intercul-
tural Communication at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków. She is the author of
over 100 scholarly articles and her books include Cognitive Linguistics and Poet-
ics of Translation (Gunter Narr 1993) and Language and Imagery: An Introduc-
tion to Cognitive Linguistics (Kraków 1995). A collection of papers, Cognition in
Language,was published in her honour (Tertium 2007).
Wenjuan Yuan is Lecturer in English Language and Literature at Hunan University,
China, where she teaches literary linguistics and cognitive poetics. She took her
doctorate from the School of English at the University of Nottingham, with research
in the exploration of cognition and kinetics in the poetry of William Wordsworth.
Her current work develops this cognitive poetic reading of R omantic poetry and
her wider research interests include a cognitive approach to comparative literature.