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Cognitive Grammar in Contemporary Fiction

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Cognitive Grammar in Contemporary Fiction 1 Cognitive Grammar in Contemporary Fiction Cognitive Grammar in Contemporary Fiction 2 Cognitive Grammar in Contemporary Fiction Contents Chapter 1. Introduction 1.1. Cognitive Grammar in fiction 1.2. Methods and texts 1.2.1. Text choice: Contemporary and postmodern fiction 1.2.2. Postmodern texts: A stylistic profile 1.2.3. Online reader reviews 1.3. Cognitive linguistics in stylistics 1.4. Structure of book Chapter 2. Cognitive Grammar: An overview 2.1. Grammar as meaning 2.1.1. Grammar as construction Figure 2.1. The symbolic construction 2.2. CG: Some central concepts 2.2.1. Trajector and landmark 2.2.2. Image schemas 2.2.3. Construal 2.2.4. Grounding construal relationships Figure 2.2. Maximally objective vs. maximally subjective construal 2.2.5. The compositional path 2.2.6. Action chains 2.2.7. Reference points and scanning Figure.2.3. The reference point model 2.2.8. The current discourse space Figure 2.4. The current discourse space. 2.2.9. Fictive simulation 2.3. CG as a discourse framework 2.3.1. Defining discourse 2.3.2. Scalability 2.4. CG and other cognitive models 2.4.1. Text World Theory 2.4.2. Schema theory 2.4.3. Deictic shift theory 2.4.4. Mind-modelling 2.5. Review Chapter 3. Action chains and grounding in Enduring Love 3.1. Introduction 3.1.1. Action, energy, process 3.2. Enduring Love 3 Cognitive Grammar in Contemporary Fiction 3.3. Grounding perspective Extract 3.1. Enduring Love 3.4. Narrative urgency and ‘the generation of multiplicity’ 3.5. Action chains and clausal grounding Table 3.1. ‘Run’ phrasal constructions 3.5.1. Modality and metaphor 3.6. Nominal grounding: Schematicity vs. specificity Figure 3.1. (Under-) specificity of reference: The hot air balloon accident 3.7. Conclusion: ‘What were we running toward?’ 3.8. Review Chapter 4. The reference point model: Tracking character roles in The New York Trilogy 4.1. Introduction 4.1.1. Reference points in fiction 4.2. The New York Trilogy and the postmodern quest 4.2.1. Layers and targets Figure 4.1. Narrative layering Table 4.1. Schematised model of actants and processes Figure 4.2. RPM after Dimovitz’s (2006) reading of The Trilogy 4.3. Reader response: Tracking character roles Table 4.2. A cognitive typology of reference Figure 4.3. RPM after Todorov (1977): Equivalent targets in City of Glass Figure 4.4. RPM after R1 (2011): The discarded target 4.4. (R)evoking targets Extract 4.1. City of Glass Extract 4.2. Ghosts Extract 4.3. The Locked Room 4.5. Conclusion: ‘The story is not in the words; it’s in the struggle’ 4.6. Review Chapter 5. Interrelated references and fictional world elaboration in Coraline 5.1. Introduction 5.2. Construal: Production and reception 5.2.1. Construction schemas 5.3. Elaboration and world comparison: The ‘other world’ of Coraline Extract 5.1. Coraline 5.3.1. Elaborative relationships 5.4. Reading Coraline 5.5. Resistance and identification 5.5.1. Reader response: Character Table 5.1. Interrelated reference points in Coraline reviews 5.5.2. Reader response: Fictional world 5.6. Conclusion: ‘It was so familiar – that was what made it feel so truly strange’ 5.7. Review 4 Cognitive Grammar in Contemporary Fiction Chapter 6. Mind-modelling perspective in ‘Great Rock and Roll Pauses’ 6.1. Introduction: Visual attention in cognitive linguistics and CG 6.2. ‘Great Rock and Roll Pauses’ 6.2.1. Mind-modelling perspective 6.3. CG and multimodality Figure 6.1. Updating the CDS of ‘Great Rock and Roll Pauses’ Figure 6.2. ‘Walking to the Car’ Figure 6.3. ‘Lincoln Wants to Say/ Ends Up Saying’ Figure 6.4. ‘“What is going on in here?”’ Figure 6.5. ‘Mom’s “Art”’ Figure 6.6. ‘What I’m Afraid Of’ 6.4. Event frames 6.5. Multimodal perspective in ‘Great Rock and Roll Pauses’ 6.5.1. Attentional windowing 6.5.2. Speech presentation 6.5.3. Viewing arrangements and conceptual distancing 6.6. Conclusion: ‘Music first, and then the pause’ 6.7. Review Chapter 7. Scanning the compositional path of ‘Here We Aren’t, So Quickly’ 7.1. Introduction 7.1.2. Scanning paths 7.2. ‘Here We Aren’t, So Quickly’ Extract 7.1. ‘Here We Aren’t, So Quickly’ 7.3. Analysability (‘I counted the seconds backward’) Figure 7.1. The analysable text world structures of ‘Here We Aren’t, So Quickly’, paragraph one 7.4. Components (‘Not wilfully unclear, just trying to say it as it wasn’t’) Table 7.1. Sequentially accessed locations in ‘Here We Aren’t, So Quickly’ 7.5. Composition (‘Everything else happened – why not the things that could have?’) 7.6. Conclusion: ‘We reached the middle so quickly’ 7.7. Review Chapter 8. Conclusion 8.1. Introduction 8.2. Overview 8.3. Suitability for stylistics: Scalability and rigour 8.4. Replicability References Appendix Index 5 Cognitive Grammar in Contemporary Fiction Chapter 1. Introduction 1.1. Cognitive Grammar in fiction Stylistics is the study of linguistic patterns in texts. Put simply, it is the exploration and consideration of the relationship between linguistic choice and literary interpretation. With its roots in rhetoric (see Burke 2014; Cockcroft and Cockcroft 2014; Hamilton 2014), stylistics can be thought of as the intersection between English language and English literature – although its application is not necessarily confined to literary texts. At the core of stylistics is the idea that language choices directly impact upon the way that readers perceive and understand what they read. The discipline therefore offers a way of analysing texts that places a focus on language at the forefront of study. Recently, the study of stylistics has taken a cognitive turn, and cognitive poetics (also known as cognitive stylistics) has emerged as a progressive field of research that offers a renewed focus on readerly interpretation by drawing on cognitive science, cognitive psychology and, more recently, cognitive linguistics (Tsur 1992; for an overview of the field see also Harrison and Stockwell 2014). Like previous stylistic analysis, cognitive poetics is similarly premised on the ‘concern that any readerly interpretative account must be underpinned by transparent textual evidence’; but the incorporation of cognitive methodologies means that the study of cognitive poetics additionally ‘offers a reconnection of literary scholarship with natural readers’ (Harrison and Stockwell 2014: 218-219). Considering the insights drawn from systemic-functional models over the past few decades and the revolutionary analyses that cognitive linguistics has brought to the 6 Cognitive Grammar in Contemporary Fiction fore, several of the difficulties that arise in the stylistic application of Hallidayan, cognitive linguistic and narratological frameworks seem to be resolvable from the perspective of Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1987, 1990, 1991, 2008, 2009; see also Croft and Cruse 2004; Evans and Green 2006; Taylor 2002). Cognitive Grammar in Contemporary Fiction puts forward the idea that Cognitive Grammar (CG) can and should be included in the stylistics ‘toolkit’ (Wales 2014). Recent studies have shown its suitability for a range of analyses, from Critical Discourse Analysis (Hart 2014a, 2014b) to second language acquisition (Arnett and Jernigan 2014; Matsumoto 2008). Specifically, this book argues that CG offers a means of accounting for experiential organisation, the attenuation of experience and how it is simulated, in a literary reading. Thus, this volume offers a framework compatible with cognitive poetics’ renewed focus: drawing connections between textual patterns and the interpretative and experiential responses of natural readers. Cognitive Grammar in Contemporary Fiction develops, almost from an incipient point, the application of CG concepts in literary analysis, and aims to establish a verifiable framework and clear methodological principles for their application. In many of the analyses in this book it is suggested that a stylistic account using CG can help expand on current literary linguistic models, which is an approach commonly adopted by some of the initial CG stylistic analyses (see, for examples, Giovanelli 2013; Harrison et al. 2014; Harrison and Stockwell 2014; Herman 2009a; Nuttall 2014; Stockwell 2009). As much as possible this text follows the definitions of central CG concepts that appear in Langacker’s most recent overview of the field: Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction (2008). Due to Langacker’s prolific number of publications in CG over the past few decades, this focus on his most recent work will provide a more current, 7 Cognitive Grammar in Contemporary Fiction unified and informed theoretical foundation. The central CG concepts applied in this volume are introduced and defined in Chapter 2. 1.2. Methods and texts 1.2.1. Text choice: Contemporary and postmodern fiction CG is a type of grammar from cognitive linguistics that is premised on the idea that all language is embodied (see Chapter 2 for an introduction to the model and its main concepts). CG further claims to be a usage-based grammar, a term which holds that ‘there is no principled distinction between knowledge of language and use of language (competence and performance in generative terms), since knowledge emerges from use’ (Evans and Green 2006: 478). This label seems to be applied somewhat loosely, however. Though the original work on CG does focus on language and its use, and considers how the choice of different grammatical structures determines inference of different conceptual content, all of the textual illustrations in the original accounts (see, for examples, Langacker 1987, 1991) are manufactured examples of language. In other words, there is a lack of consideration of real linguistic utterances, in real contexts. If CG is truly a usage-based discipline, it should be directly applicable to the language of literature.
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