Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar


Book Description

Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar advances our understanding of mind style: the experience of other minds, or worldviews, through language in literature. This book is the first to set out a detailed, unified framework for the analysis of mind style using the account of language and cognition set out in cognitive grammar. Drawing on insights from cognitive linguistics, Louise Nuttall aims to explain how character and narrator minds are created linguistically, with a focus on the strange minds encountered in the genre of speculative fiction. Previous analyses of mind style are reconsidered using cognitive grammar, alongside original analyses of four novels by Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Matheson and J.G. Ballard. Responses to the texts in online forums and literary critical studies ground the analyses in the experiences of readers, and support an investigation of this effect as an embodied experience cued by the language of a text. Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar advances both stylistics and cognitive linguistics, whilst offering new insights for research in speculative fiction.




Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar


Book Description

Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar advances our understanding of mind style: the experience of other minds, or worldviews, through language in literature. This book is the first to set out a detailed, unified framework for the analysis of mind style using the account of language and cognition set out in cognitive grammar. Drawing on insights from cognitive linguistics, Louise Nuttall aims to explain how character and narrator minds are created linguistically, with a focus on the strange minds encountered in the genre of speculative fiction. Previous analyses of mind style are reconsidered using cognitive grammar, alongside original analyses of four novels by Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Matheson and J.G. Ballard. Responses to the texts in online forums and literary critical studies ground the analyses in the experiences of readers, and support an investigation of this effect as an embodied experience cued by the language of a text. Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar advances both stylistics and cognitive linguistics, whilst offering new insights for research in speculative fiction.




Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar


Book Description

Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar advances our understanding of mind style: the experience of other minds, or worldviews, through language in literature. This book is the first to set out a detailed, unified framework for the analysis of mind style using the account of language and cognition set out in cognitive grammar. Drawing on insights from cognitive linguistics, Louise Nuttall aims to explain how character and narrator minds are created linguistically, with a focus on the strange minds encountered in the genre of speculative fiction. Previous analyses of mind style are reconsidered using cognitive grammar, alongside original analyses of four novels by Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Matheson and J.G. Ballard. Responses to the texts in online forums and literary critical studies ground the analyses in the experiences of readers, and support an investigation of this effect as an embodied experience cued by the language of a text. Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar advances both stylistics and cognitive linguistics, whilst offering new insights for research in speculative fiction.




New Directions in Cognitive Grammar and Style


Book Description

In recent years, the Cognitive Grammar account of language and mind has become an influential framework for the study of textual meaning and interpretation. This book is the first to bring together applications of Cognitive Grammar for a range of stylistic purposes, including the analysis of both literary and non-literary discourse. Demonstrating the diverse range of uses for Cognitive Grammar, chapters apply this framework to diverse text-types including poetry, narrative fiction, comics, press reports, political discourse and music, as well as exploring its potential for the teaching of language and literature in a range of contexts. Combining cutting-edge research in cognitive, critical and pedagogical stylistics, New Directions in Cognitive Grammar and Style showcases the latest developments in this field and offers new insights into our experiences of literary and non-literary texts by drawing on current understandings of language and cognition.




Cognitive Grammar in Stylistics


Book Description

Providing an engaging, accessible and practically-focused introduction to cognitive grammar, this book demonstrates how central cognitive grammar principles can be used in stylistic analyses. Assuming no prior knowledge, it leads students through the basics of cognitive grammar, outlining its place within the field of cognitive linguistics as a whole, providing clear explanations of key principles and concepts, and explaining how these can be used to support the study of a range of literary and non-literary texts. Thoroughly updated throughout to encompass emerging trends in the field, this second edition features: - Increased exploration of a range of topics, including specificity and definiteness, scanning, perfective and imperfective verbs, action chains, and subjective and objective construal - A brand new chapter on extended projects in cognitive grammar - Additional activities, including on a wider range of literary texts - Further solutions to modelled answers - Updated examples, references, and further reading recommendations Presenting cognitive grammar as a powerful alternative to more traditional grammatical models to enable the analysis of texts, the book's primary focus is on the practical application of cognitive grammar to examples of language in context and on its potential for specifically literary and non-literary material. It offers a clear and facilitating approach to allow students to describe language features carefully and to explore how these descriptions can be developed into full and rich analyses.




Cognitive Grammar in Literature


Book Description

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.




English Stylistics


Book Description

This accessible textbook hinges on the central assumptions of Cognitive Linguistics and Cognitive Grammar, introducing students to the analytical tools they need to approach Stylistics, an essential area in language analysis. The author verifies the claim that alterations in style, triggered by different cognitive processes, reflect alterations in meaning, and shows how they are employed to achieve particular effects in context. The book links theory with practice, aiming both to acquaint students with the cognitive principles that account for stylistic expressions, and to provide them with the tools and techniques to conduct their own analyses. The textbook explores and explains how writers use the resources of language to create meaning, and how readers interpret texts. It will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students on courses in English Linguistics, as well as those working on other languages and in related areas such as Composition and Creative Writing.




Cognitive Stylistics


Book Description

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.




Cognitive Grammar in Contemporary Fiction


Book Description

This book proposes an extension of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1987, 1991, 2008) towards a cognitive discourse grammar, through the unique environment that literary stylistic application offers. Drawing upon contemporary research in cognitive stylistics (Text World Theory, deixis and mind-modelling, amongst others), the volume scales up central Cognitive Grammar concepts (such as construal, grounding, the reference point model and action chains) in order to explore the attenuation of experience – and how it is simulated – in literary reading. In particular, it considers a range of contemporary texts by Neil Gaiman, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Safran Foer, Ian McEwan and Paul Auster. This application builds upon previous work that adopts Cognitive Grammar for literary analysis and provides the first extended account of Cognitive Grammar in contemporary fiction.




Language and the Creative Mind


Book Description

This volume brings together papers from the 11th Conceptual Structure, Discourse and Language Conference, held in Vancouver in May 2012. In the last few years, the cognitive study of language has begun to examine the interaction between language and other embodied communicative modalities, such as gesture, while at the same time expanding the traditional limits of linguistic and cognitive enquiry into creative domains such as music, literature, and visual images. Papers in this collection show how the study of language paves the way for these new areas of investigation. They bring issues of multimodal communication to the attention of linguists, while also looking through and beyond language into various domains of human creativity. This refreshed view of the relations across various communicative domains will be important not only to linguists, but also to all those interested in the creative potential of the human mind.