Accepted Abstracts--PALA 2004

Author

Title

Key Words

Not You, Not Me, But the Company: Discourse Participants and Metaphor in Business Correspondence

In written business communications, Politeness Theory (Brown and Levinson, 1987) has been widely used to describe pragmatic features of business documents. Among them, the requests as a speech act have drawn the attention of researchers due to its prevalence in business writing. In this study approximately 230 documents of internal correspondence (memos) from two Turkish companies written both in Turkish and English have been analysed from a politeness perspective.

The analysis of the requests found in the memos reveals linguistic behaviour related to politeness issues, which seem to be culturally determined. Almost all negative face-saving strategies found in the requests aim at impersonalizing the request by avoiding referring to the agent status of the receiver with respect to the requested act. As a result, personal references to the receiver and, to a lesser extent, to the sender are very limited. On the other hand, the company emerges as a discourse participant, the 'principal' in Goffmann's terminology, in the internal communications of the companies. Neither the sender nor the receiver is present in the text as individuals to the same degree as the company. This is especially true of cases where the text contains a face-threatening act, such as a request. Interestingly, the company is used in active sentences mostly in the agent role, while the "real" agents are carefully removed from the text with impersonalizing linguistic strategies such as passive.

Text World Theory, proposed and developed by Paul Werth (1994, 1995a, 1995b, 1997 and 1999), is a cognitive and pragmatic theory of reading. It deals with the whole text and its surrounding context and it is fundamentally 'experiential' i.e. it deals with real language, real situation and real people. The basic structure of Text world theory is that it consists of three layers: discourse world, text world, and sub-world. This paper is an attempt to establish a comprehensive analysis for Raymond Carver's short story What Do You Do In San Francisco? By employing the methodology of the Text World Approach along with examining the prominent stylistic features found across the story through repeating four portions of its main narrative. Such repetition comes, in fact, through repeating four key words, distributed throughout the narrator's flashback text world, i.e. 'work', 'the woman', 'the kids' and 'the name'. These repetitions generate meaning and suggest interpretive possibilities that have a link to the central theme of the story. My aim is to propose a radical new perspective on how its ambiguous text world is created.

I give short examples of several diverse forms of literature that make use of phenomenal patterns: First, early biblical interpretation, which focused on the poetic and prophetic qualities of scriptural language that imply a single ahistorical Author. Secondly, I briefly look at medieval alchemists' theories, which sought evidence for telos in analogous structures found in the "book of nature." Thirdly, I recall Freud's psychological analysis of animism, which he argues, "is the transfer of the structural relations of one's own psyche to the outer world"; and finally, I mention a number of structuralist narrative theorists, who have sought to locate authorial intentionality in the effect of poetics and textual relations. All of these areas, biblical exegesis, alchemy, animism, and structuralism have in common the tendency to posit an external agent responsible for the unexpected meanings found in phenomenal patterns.

To conclude, I note that the formal study of phenomenal patterns and their relationship to intentionality began in Western literature with Aristotle's Physics and Poetics. In these works, Aristotle criticizes the kinds of teleological ascriptions described immediately above which, he believed, irrationally posit an external agent. According to Aristotle, phenomenal patterns are chance events that may appear to have been "caused" by an external "intelligence" but are not.

In this paper we will provide an account of the application of the CONTAINER image schema and other subsidiary schemas to the study of part of the conceptual domain of cognition.

In cognitive linguistics, image schemas are defined as recurring non-propositional patterns of experience which allow us to structure images and perceptions (Johnson, 1987; Lakoff, 1987). Image schemas have been observed to interact in various ways and to be organized in terms of dependency relationships (Cienki, 1997; Clausner & Croft, 1999). In this view, the EXCESS and the FULL-EMPTY schemas are subsidiary to the CONTAINER schema (Peña, 2003). Our data from the domain of cognition seem to support this view, as in the expressions "to have something in mind" (CONTAINER), "overflow the memory" (CONTAINER plus EXCESS), or "empty-headed" (CONTAINER plus FULL-EMPTY).

We further note that subsidiary schemas are the natural result of the development of the logic of a non-subsidiary schema. Thus, a container may be full or empty if we place objects or a substance in its interior; if filled in excess it may overflow, and so on. This has consequences for the adequate understanding of the semantic implications of using image schemas in order to come to terms with the various aspects of the domain of cognition. For example, the expression "He filled his mind with many thoughts from the past" suggests that there is only one kind of thought the protagonist could have. Not so, however, "He put in his mind many thoughts from the past". Interestingly enough, "He emptied his mind of thoughts from the past" does not involve that there are no other thoughts in the protagonist's mind. The meaning implications of this expression and of "He took many thoughts from the past out of his mind" are very similar. Only one kind of thought is taken out and the protagonist still has other thoughts in mind. This asymmetry is best explained in terms of the logic of the CONTAINER schema in its relationship with the FULL-EMPTY schema. If we say that a container is filled (with something), we assume that before it was completely empty. If we say that it is emptied, we assume that it will no longer have anything in it. But if we set about the task of specifying that it was emptied "of" something, it is implied that there is still something else inside; otherwise, the specification would have been unnecessary. Meaning implications like this are part of the semantic make-up of many linguistic expressions which exploit image-schematic structure and deserve to be explored.

Recent work on cognitive science has demonstrated that conceptual metaphor can no longer be considered as a mere rhetorical device but a basic pattern for the conceptualization of the world (Lakoff, 1987, 1989; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999).Taking into account the cognitive poetics point of view on metaphor (see Stockwell, 2002; Semino and Culpeper, 2002) in this paper we intend to deal with the building of the main characters in the best-seller novel The Sculptress by Minnete Walters. In this respect, it will be seen how conceptual metaphors and image schemas play a leading role in the description of different characters of the novel.

The novel deals with the investigation carried out by a journalist of a awful crime committed by a mysterious woman. This is not an action novel, but rather the narrative is centered in the mental activity of the characters and in their presentation as psychologically complex individuals.

We notice that different conceptual metaphors are used for the conceptualization of the various mental processes performed by the characters. On the other hand, there is not a recurrent use of emotion metaphors. However, this contrast between emotions and thoughts has its reflection in the novel: recurrently, characters' rationality in this novel seems to be impaired by the interference of emotions. (e.g. She let some moments pass while common sense battled with the angry reproaches that were clamouring inside her head).

Concerning the description of the psyche of the characters, we have observed that conceptual metaphors such as UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING or BELIEVING IS EATING are relevant for the expression of the character's features. However, it seems that the most important metaphors for doing so have image schematic basis. Image schemas, as described by Johnson (1987) are abstract constructs of topological nature that serve us to conceptualize the world. For example, the main female characters are seen as closed containers. They are people that keep many secrets, in the case of the journalist they are revealed (they come out of the container), while in the case of the killer her thoughts remain enclosed in her mind. There are hardly 'literal' references to the protagonist's mental activities maybe because she is a mysterious woman and nobody knows what is going on in her mind, and when there is a description it is metaphorical in terms of the PATH image schema (e.g. Images, gleaned from things people had said, chased themselves across Roz's mind). Finally, the BALANCE image schema is used in order to conceptualize the unstable mental abilities of the sculptress (e.g. the balance of her mind was temporarily disturbed). We will take into account these and other conceptual mappings that are constantly used to characterize the main roles in this novel.

Uncovering the Emotive Aspect in "Reporting Accidents" in the Egyptian Media

Media Discourse is known for the diversity of its sub-genres. 'Reporting Accidents' - tales of accidents, disasters and crimes- is one of these sub-genres that have their own stylistic features. Nevertheless, 'Reporting Accidents' has never been dealt with as a separate sub-genre. Hence, this study aims at tackling the linguistic and stylistic features of 'Reporting Accidents'. A further objective is to find out how this genre is similar to and different from other related genres. The data explored in this study is drawn from a weekly Egyptian newspaper "Akhbar Al-hawadith" (Accidents News) which is specialised in reporting accidents.

The analysis of this data is based on a study of the narrative structure, the manipulation of the speech and thought presentation of the people involved in the narrative, the extensive use of figures of speech, besides other linguistic and stylistic features. The analysis also explores the presence of literariness in such genres. Furthermore, this paper deals with the emotive effect of such stylistic features. It expands upon the premise that information content and emotive effect are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, the stylistic features of this sub-genre are exploited to have an emotive effect on the readers, hence, their involvement. Thus, the current study is both descriptive and interpretive: describing its stylistic features as well as interpreting the impact of such features on the readers.

New forms of research with ICT (Information and Communication Technologies)

Socrates - we read in Plato's Phaidros - didn't trust written texts. He believed, they talk to you as they were intelligent, but never answer your questions when you seek for deeper understanding, and never differ whom and when they tell their truth. Now, almost 2500 years later, the internet brings us back to a dialectic approach towards understanding.

The Internet and its possibilities for worldwide communication have opened a new chapter in world globalisation. There has been so far a focus on the possibilities of world wide connectivity in real time, the understanding grows that new Information and Communication Technologies offer revolutionary possibilities for worldwide cooperation, which can (and will) be a driving force in the creation of a global village. Chat, for example, is written communication in real time, informative texts, which can be connected to discussion forums, creating a mixture of direct and indirect communication. Lectures can be available as multimedia files independent from place and time, cut into small parts and connected via Hypertext to online published papers, mixing in a creative new way written and oral teaching. Especially Hypertext opens up a world of new possibilities to connect information far beyond the mere navigation tool, which it has been until today.

But - even though the Internet was originally invented at CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) for the cooperation among scientists - it seems that science lost its interest after a euphoric decade of often utopian ideas about what might be possible in future. This attitude forgets that the Internet already offers totally new possibilities of knowledge acquisition and management, which do not only improve research and teaching possibilities, but also will be the daily life in the working environment of students. Still most Universities stick to old fashion lectures, where students gather at a certain place for a certain time and listen to a Professor, which is an unnecessary limitation not only for the possibilities of an intercultural exchange, but even more for a dialectic approach towards scientific cooperation.

REDES (Research for the Development of Empirical Studies) is a cooperation of Universities from all over the world. During a seminar in summer 2004 students from three REDES-Universities - Munich (Germany), Utrecht (Netherlands), and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) - work together on research projects using the Internet for their communication. The paper shows how different means of communications served different functions of cooperation. It will give an overview of technical as well as cultural problems and show past and future examples for similar projects.

Language has never been an efficient medium, especially to writers who have been concerned with the accurate and faithful representation of truth through it. For the deconstructionist, writing is at best irrelevant to what it expresses and at worst a barrier to it because language, its medium, is unstable, empty, ambiguous, and even deceptive, never capturing the signified. Renaissance writers also faced manifold difficulties involved in writing in so unlikely, estranged, and unverisimilar a medium as defective language. Though it may be anachronistic to attribute post-modern ideas of language to the early modern writers by assuming that their notions and function of language are constant trough time, it seems a useful effort to discover and explore much earlier writers' inescapably modern assumptions, which nevertheless were conceived without modern vocabularies for describing, in any sense to which our terminology can intelligibly be applied.

While the awareness and conviction of the ultimate failure of language is much prevalent in recent art, we can trace back some of the basic ideas about the instability of language in the early modern period, particularly in the first English sonnet sequence, Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, in which a similar skepticism about the adequacy of language in modern terms can be traced. Nearly all of the sonnet sequences that followed Astrophil and Stella repeatedly return to this issue, which becomes the dominant trope in the later sequences. Sidney was concerned about representing what is in the heart and made this the focus of Astrophil and Stella, which begins with the most illustrious opening line, 'Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show'. Struggling to find the fit words to show his love, the poet is acutely aware of the discrepancy between what words can show and what is truly in his heart and actually makes this discrepancy the central concern in this sonnet. What he confronts in his struggle with language to show his love is the emptiness of language as signifier, not to be confounded with the signified. This paper aims to explore a very post-modern awareness of language represented in a number of sonnets from Astrophil and Stella, in which Astrophil/Sidney struggles and grapples with the limits of convention and the inability of language in what appear very post-modern terms. The discussion leads to a claim that Astrophil/Sidney virtually is a post- modern theorist of language lived in the early modern period.

Barney, Dr. Tom

Stylistics has concerned itself largely with the question of how readers make sense of literary texts, and this tendency is increasing. In this paper I wish rather to use the stylistic analysis of literary works to illuminate their underlying themes, to focus on the writer rather than the reader. I distinguish between the subject of a literary work - exemplified by, for example, plot, characters, the situation or phenomenon described - and its theme - what the subject symbolises, the work's psychological import, the writer's preoccupation. Themes and the ways they spring from writers' personal needs are matters which have been examined by some psychologists (e.g. Hudson (1972), Hudson and Jacot (1991), Storr (1976)) but hardly at all by stylisticians.

Many creative artists have characteristic themes and preoccupations to which they return again and again, and which spring from a tension between conflicting inner drives. As Moore (1984:vii) points out, 'a successful synthesis' of these conflicting drives also results in 'a unified and unique style plain for all to recognize'. It follows that we can expect to find the treatment of characteristic themes minutely encoded in literary language. Hampshire (1969:xv) has argued that an individual style suggests 'a theory… of the natural movements of the mind and of their proper expression'; these 'natural movements of the mind' leave a trail of linguistic evidence which can be closely analysed. Themes can thus be made manifest, and they in their turn provide evidence of the particular kind of discontent which drives an author to create.

I shall use a variety of literary examples to show not only how stylistic analysis can be used to illuminate the treatment of such themes and so the writer's motivations, but also that it can enable us to disinter themes which might otherwise remain hidden and which are sometimes unexpected.

This paper will consider verbal cliché as an important and underexamined stylistic resource in the work of modernist writers such as Proust, Joyce and Beckett.

The paper will argue that the conscious use of a worn-out discourse allowed these writers to interrogate Romantic ideas of literariness and the work of art. In their work, the phenomenon of decay in language, as well as life, brings into question the authority and consolations of past literary forms. The concept of cliché emerges in the wake of a Romantic aesthetic. Its etymology points us toward the new technologies for the reproduction of text, which produced both an anxious desire for originality and authenticity and its flip side - the consciousness of cliché. The mass dissemination of literature, I argue, foreshortens the shelf-life of certain literary effects, and creates a new climate for their reception. This paper explores how certain modernist writers respond to these developments, and use imaginative new ways to engage with and re-define familiar stylistic gestures.

Cliché is at the cusp of written and spoken language, bearing the mark of textual reproduction but also circulating freely in oral discourse. It is difficult to say where a locution moves from being idiom, a forceful feature of discourse connecting literature to the life of a language, to being stereotype: mechanical, impersonal and trite. As the site where these ideas come into conflict, cliché plays a key role in revealing the values that attach to both writing and speech in the modernist aesthetic.

The re-engineering that modernist writers such as Joyce and Beckett perform on familiar locutions can reveal semantic and stylistic reserves that have been occluded, as well as creating new meanings and effects. This process also brings to light the relationship between figurative language and cognition. Degenerative metaphor, as linguistics describes cliché, allows these writers to interrogate the habits of expression that condition our thinking. The relationship between literal and figurative language itself comes to seem an unstable one, and new insights about the relationship between language, self and world emerge.

Ogut, Ozlem

This paper aims to analyze "Snow", the most recent novel by the internationally acclaimed novelist Orhan Pamuk who uses a strikingly innovative stylistic technique that places the novel both in time and timelessness. While in the foreground the novel seems to reflect the macrocosmic social and political scenes of Turkey, commenting on contemporary issues such as radical Islam, modernism, and military interventions, it does so by structuring the whole novel around the central metaphor of a snowflake, a traditional mystic symbol, that creates an atmosphere of indlessness. The setting, the theme and the form of the novel, all draw on the specific characteristics of a snowflake that is unique, has a perfectly symmetrical hexagonal shape, and like crystal reflects multiple colors.

Ka, the protagonist poet of Pamuk's novel, places 19 poems he wrote during his stay in Snow Palace Hotel in the snowbound city Kars, along the three main axes of a drawing of a snowflake, which he names the axes of Reason, Imagination and Memory, with the poem titled "I, Ka" at the center. Like the crystallike snowflake that absorbs and reflects the world around it to gradually dissolve them, the events and the characters that inspired the poems dissolve and blend in with each other. Opposing forces in the novel balance each other out as in the perfect symmetry of the snowflake as Ka experiences the present, dreaming of his future happiness in the city of his past, but this time with the daughter of the owner of the Snow Palace Hotel in Kars, the love of his life. Indeed, Ka, in his old grey coat, encounters in this white city people whose lives become inextricably entangled with his past and his future.

My paper will explore the literariness of Marcel Duchamp's notion of "literary painting" which he attributes to his work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, also known as the Large Glass (1915-23). Duchamp presents the notion as a corrective against the emphasis on the visual dimension of painting and a way of testing the border relations between visual and verbal which he finds inherent in both modernist writing and visual art.

Literary painting in Duchamp's sense, I suggest, can be understood in two principal ways. According to the first understanding, common among interpretations of The Bride Stripped Bare, the designation refers to the painting insofar as it resists a primarily visual appreciation while aspiring to possess an effective literary character. The painting models itself on highly distinct literary examples - Alfred Jarry, Raymond Roussel, and the Gertrude Stein of Tender Buttons - in an attempt to ask of its reader what they very specifically ask of theirs.

A second, more radical understanding of what is meant by literary painting is revealed by Duchamp's cover designs for the Surrealist journal View (1945). The cover designs allude to both the Large Glass and the Green Box (1934), a closely related work consisting of recycled working notes and drawings. Together the View covers rephrase the literary-visual aspect of the relation of these two earlier works specifically in terms of the concept of the infra-thin, which the designs introduce both textually (via a caption) and iconically (via an illustration).

According to the second understanding, a painting has the possibility of becoming, under certain conditions and through certain procedures, an object of literary discourse. Through ekphrasis, narration, or rhetorical invention, for instance, a painting may "cross over" into a literary text. Yet Duchamp's solution to the problem of an overly "retinal" art cannot be to continue painting in, or replace painting with, a literary mode of production. Rather the challenge of literary painting will be to manifest only an "infra-thin" degree of the literariness (or literary potential) inherent in a given painting - that is, to present no more than a vivid sign of the painting's potential for becoming a distinct literary object.

My paper will analyze Duchamp's procedural remarks on achieving such an "infra-thin" literary manifestation on the surface of painting. In addition to considering the definition of literariness these remarks assume, I will argue that they constitute a poetics applying to both literary and visual practices and thus provide a method for studying intersections between the two.

The linguistic analysis of literary texts has been regarded with suspicion by many literary critics. Sometimes stylisticians try to revisit critics' subjective and impressionistic opinions to test them out or to back them up through quantitative studies of literary works. In this vein, in this paper I will attempt to examine the linguistic evidence for and against the intuitive criticism of Hemingway's novels by a computer-assisted corpus linguistic method. Literary critics such as Meyers 1972, Cowley 1962 and Weeks 1960 claim that Hemingway's style changed from his early novels to his later ones. The early novels are said to be simple, and the later more elaborate. The present paper will undertake a comparative study of Hemingway's early novels and later ones via corpus linguistic and statistical analysis.

William Carlos Williams's poem "The Yachts" details an idyllic yacht race which transforms, in the poet's mind, into a horrific vision of arms, faces, and bodies being "thrown recklessly" as they are "cut aside" by the boats.

With the final image, Williams ends the poem without explanation or excuses for the abrupt change of imagery. The final image has been interpreted by many scholars as Williams's critique on social ideals and U.S. economic conditions at the time of the poem. Scholars have no qualms at accepting this interpretation, and many have looked for evidence within his letters and other writings that would point to the influence of such a disturbing image.

For example, Paul Mariani ties "The Yachts" and Dante's Inferno through the use of terza rima and the image of Dante riding in the boat over the waters of the damned. Mariani, also, relates the image to Williams's letters discussing Pound's book Jefferson and/or Mussolini and Williams's own political views. Though these easily can be seen as an explanation for where Williams found inspiration for the image, there still remains the question of how the metaphor works to convey the intended meaning. How does the reader understand the inherent message of the poem to be a critique on social ideals and economic conditions, if they are not familiar with the works that supposedly influenced Williams? Does the poem fail to convey this meaning if the reader is unaware of Williams's opinion? The poem does not reference Williams's influences nor does it explicitly state what the meaning is in the final image, yet I would assert the poem provides sufficient information to the reader to convey its meaning.

Since the poem does convey its meaning, then another explanation for how the poem is successful must be created. Fauconnier and Turner's blending theory provides insight into how the metaphor works. With the blending theory, the relationship between the two parts of the metaphor, the human relationship/conflict and the yacht race, is fully examined and shows how the metaphor does not only affect the final image but also images throughout the poem. The analysis also shows that the poem cannot be fully explained by the standard cognitive theory of Lakoff and Johnson because a simple mapping of the source domain onto the target domain does not occur. The double-scope blend of the human relations blend and the yacht race blend (both already the product of blending) provides for emergent structures which are not initially apparent. The blending theory allows for a detailed analysis of the metaphor through the use of diagraming and listing of the vocabulary in relation to the inputs. Fauconnier and Turner's blending theory provides a thorough approach to analyzing "The Yachts."

Neverwinter Nights, the most recent epic three-dimensional computerized role-playing game by BioWare, situates its human players in a world of beasts, magic and various action oriented storylines. The game player is supplied with software that allows the individual to create their own "worlds" using space, objects, language and human character forms. For the field of literacy research, Neverwinter Nights offers an opportunity to examine literacy in terms of current views of literacy as developed from a physical world where being in existence and having understanding is based on a cognitive and socially constructed identity; as well as current views of literacy developed for the purpose of situated people in a world they create, using identities and cognitive and social platforms they imagine. In a sense, my research is a meta cognitive examination of multiple literacies. I will present my research as a multimodal discourse analysis through my experience as a persona in Neverwinter Nights; and also by comparing this virtual literacy experience with the human literacy experience that is common to our everyday lives. My presentation will include insights into the nature of cognitively created "worlds" and how literacies exist and occur in these "worlds" as well as insights into the different "worlds" we create for our everyday roles of educator, friend, family member, student, etc. My presentation will include a close look at the human as portrayed in Neverwinter Nights, the interpretations that can be made, the preconceived notions of health, body and mind, as well as the assumptions made by BioWare as to the common literacies needed to participate in this "world". My audience will hopefully be able to receive insights into common literacy practices perhaps not fully considered yet as true multimodal discourse forms; and they will also hopefully gain a better knowledge of how we as individuals conceive our "self" and how we would see our "self" as an "other" in a self-constructed world based on our imagination.

This paper finds its source in the tension that operates between two of Ezra Pound's pronouncements, both of which are hard-wired into the fabric of his poetic and critical work: "Every allegedly great age is an age of translations," and "It can't be all in one language." While Pound's practice of translation has recently been the focus of a few excellent studies, the second term of the unlikely equation, namely the stubborn presence of foreign languages in his works-with the notable exception of his exuberant and expansive use of Chinese- is cast aside, surprisingly enough, in most discussions. The inevitable result is that interpretations of Pound's poetics have been too one-sidedly determined by translation. Without denying the importance of Pound's revolutionary and controversial practice of translation, I would like to foreground the multilingual temptations of his texts. In effect, a work that espouses a poetics of translation, presenting a series of somewhat domesticated adaptations as opposed to texts in the original, would seem to celebrate monolingualism, more representative of a French Mallarmean vein than of Pound's multilingualism.

I propose to look at how foreign languages, in the original and in translation, shape Pound's modernist poetics. Taken synchronically, the two quotations might reveal a discrepancy between his literary theory and practice, between the imagined ideal work and an inevitably lesser realization. Whereas the critic extols the virtues of a poetics guided by translation, the modernist poet acknowledges that translation, a consequence of the collapsed monument of language, can only hope to reduce the chaos among the ruins of Babel. Taken diachronically, the declarations also help trace the increasing role of foreign languages and multilingualism in Pound's work. A challenge for poet-critics, at least since Dante and Du Bellay, has been to create a vernacular literary language free from the jealous hold of the official literary tongue. Pound inscribes himself in this tradition, only to supersede it by developing a literary language that challenges the very idea of a national literature. The resistance to translation marked by the refusal of linguistic uniformity and the resilience of the foreign within a primarily English text-itself informed by translation-creates an estrangement effect, a token of literariness. Indeed, the idea of poetic language as foreign is something Pound takes very literally: whereas for Mallarmé it is the vernacular itself that is made strange, for Pound, poetry is made strange by becoming polyglot.

The object of my interest is the problem of interrelation between the norm and the rhetoric figure or metabola discussed on the example of the odes of Georgian eulogists (12th-13th centuries) - Shavteli's "Abdul-Mesia" and Chakhrukhadze's "Tamariani". My choice was conditioned by the form and idea of these odes, which create the basis for the abundance of metabolas.

Shavteli's "Abdul-Mesia" and Chakhrukhadze's "Tamariani" are the highly organized homophony of the rhythmic-musical sonority based on the rich internal and external rhythms. The language forms of different levels (old, new, dialectal, occasional) and the skillfully selected variants of phonetic, grammatical, derivative and lexical elements are used to serve the purpose of this homophony not being violated.

Language is characterized by redundancy, to put it in other words, the language elements are repeated in speech, which guarantees the understanding of the language information in spite of the mistakes made during the communication. This is the autocorrection, which is possible only when the general number of violations does not exceed the level of redundancy. Proceeding from the character of the eulogists' odes very often the metabolas move so for away from the norm that they cause quite a different explanation on the part of scholars or simply remain incomprehensible.

The paper deals with the following cases of metaplasms: aphesis - loss of a sound at the beginning of the word, syncope - omitting a sound from the middle of the word, apocope - cutting off the end of the word, syneresis, synesis, merging of consonants, epenthesis or infixation, introduction of a sound into the word, paragoge - addition of affixes at the end of the word, syllepsis and translation.

Any form in a verse proceeds from the demands of its phonetic organization. The poets' unbounded freedom is determined by the nature of the language. It is the language that is the invisible bridle of every license. The norm or the zero level is beyond the common use of the language.

Theories of politeness, (eg. Brown and Levinson [1978] 1987), and of impoliteness, (eg. Culpeper 1996 and Lachenicht 1980) rarely consider the effects of their face-oriented strategies outside of the context of a single turn. While Culpeper et al. (2003) do consider both how impoliteness pans out in extended discourse and the role of prosody in conveying impoliteness, we don't consider the effects that manipulating or exploiting interactant expectations, through the use of specific turn taking mechanisms, can have in the production of impolite face damaging utterances. The broad aim of this paper, then, is to explore the role of Preference Organization (cf. Sacks 1992), which, when coupled with the concept of Conductivity in questions (cf. Quirk et al. 1985), can give rise to extremely powerful face damaging acts. More specifically, the paper will consider and discuss the dynamic verbal interplay between individuals using preference organization and conductivity for impolite purposes, within such confrontational discourses as car parking disputes, military training programmes and within restaurant kitchens. The conclusions drawn here, in impoliteness, will have important implications for both politeness theory in particular and for discourse studies in general.

Traditional accounts of free indirect thought (like free indirect speech, a sub-category of free indirect discourse) have identified the early nineteenth century as the moment of its appearance in the English novel, often pinpointing Jane Austen as the style's first practitioner. This paper challenges this view, showing that free indirect thought is widespread in the novels of the late eighteenth century, for example those of Fanny Burney and Charlotte Smith. I examine the intellectual and cultural contexts of the period, in the belief that a full account of how a style emerges requires an understanding of the literary-historical background. New styles, this paper argues, do not just arise spontaneously as a result of the creative genius of a particular writer. Instead, in M.M. Bakhtin's words, 'new forms of artistic visualization prepare themselves slowly, over centuries; a given epoch can do no more than create optimal conditions for the final ripening and realization of a new form.'

This paper aims to explore Kate Chopin's The Story of an Hour from a cognitive poetics perspective. The analysis emphasizes an integration of language and literature and draws upon theories developed in the general field of cognitive poetics (Stockwell 2002; Gavins and Steen 2003). For the purposes of this research, the analysis investigates the writer's use of different types of deictic expressions and shows how such use guides the reader to create the text word, leading to a better understanding/exploration of Chopin's characters and themes. The investigation reveals how the protagonist, Mrs. Mallard, reacted to the death of her husband searching for identity, freedom and the bright future.This paper attempts to explore the text world in which a feminist character challenges the traditional view of marriage, love, and individuality in a male-dominated society.

Ross, Haj

Freeman, Don

Freeman, Margaret H.

Rice, Claiborne

Steenberg, Mette

Semino, Elena

Brandt, Line

ON COGNITIVE APPRAOCHES TO LITERATURE

 Organiser: Michael Burke

(Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

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ABSTRACTS

Cognition, Style, and Poetics: Toward a Theory of Literature

Margaret H. Freeman

The short answer to the question posed by this session: "What do cognitive approaches to stylistics add to the stylistician's interpretative toolkit and/or to any other literary theoretical approach?" is: "A theory of literature that encompasses the text, the text-producer, and the text-processor." The long answer involves a definition of the term cognitive and an explanation of what I mean by "a theory of literature." With respect to the first, I define "cognitive" as it is used in Cognitive Linguistics (CL); that is, not in its general sense of anything to do with the mind, but specifically as it refers to a particular theoretical account of the conceptual workings of the embodied mind.

In Semino and Culpeper's (2002) introduction to their volume on cognitive stylistics, they differentiate the ways in which contributors situate themselves in relation to CL. Whereas some "see cognitive stylistics as part of the cognitive linguistics paradigm," "others treat cognitive linguistics as one of the cognitive theories or paradigms that can feed into cognitive stylistics" (x). I take a different view. Cognitive Linguistics is itself an interdisciplinary field, including approaches drawn from such diverse fields as cultural and social anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, and so on (see the forthcoming Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics 2004 for an overview). Since language is the medium of all literary texts, it is hard to imagine what "cognitive theories or paradigms" relevant to literary texts are not subsumed under the still developing field of Cognitive Linguistics (unless "cognitive" is being used in the broadest, and thus trivial, sense). When Semino and Culpeper's contributors point out the existing weaknesses of CL as it is applied to literary studies, these weaknesses, I would argue, do not arise from the failure of CL theory itself (certainly, I have not yet found criticism that shows this) but from the failure of not having as yet broadened its scope to include all aspects of a literary text.

The distinction Semino and Culpeper make is thus more apparent than real: although Cognitive Stylistics (CS) and Cognitive Poetics (CP) rose historically from somewhat different emphases, they nevertheless are converging at the same point. CS developed from stylistics, which focused, as its name suggests, on the formal qualities of textual style; CP developed more generally in at least two directions: from Reuven Tsur's (1992, 1998, 2003) work, whose influences include findings from psychology, New Criticism, and Russian Formalism, and from the more CL-oriented work reflected in Stockwell (2002) and Gavins and Steen (2003). Both, however, are concerned with exploring the processes by which the structure and affects of literary texts contribute to an understanding of human cognitive mechanisms. Whether the focus is on illuminating the literary work or the human mind, it seems to me that the work of all these approaches is doing both. I will argue that whereas CS draws from various theories in cognitive science as it finds them heuristically useful in illuminating texts, CP-CL situates itself within a coherent and unified theoretical framework, as practiced by the West Coast Cognitive Linguists (see references for partial list). This framework, however much still under development, enables practitioners of CP to develop a cognitive theory of literature, as well as revealing gaps in CL theory that still need to be filled. Using as an example a poetic text, I show what a CP theory of literature might look like.

References

Cuckyens, Hubert, and Dirk Geeraerts. 2004. Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. In press.

Gavins, Joanna, & Gerard Steen, eds. 2003. Cognitive Poetics in practice. London and New York: Routledge.

Semino, Elena, & Jonathan Culpeper, eds. 2002. Cognitive stylistics: Language and cognition in text analysis. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Stockwell, Peter. 2002. Cognitive Poetics: An introduction. London: Routledge.

Tsur, Reuven. 1992. Toward a theory of Cognitive Poetics. Amsterdam: North Holland.

--. 1998. Poetic Rhythm--structure and performance: An empirical study in Cognitive Poetics. Berne: Peter Lang.

--. 2003. On the shore of nothingness: A study in cognitive poetics. Exeter, UK & Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic.

Turner, Mark. 1996. The literary mind. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The West Coast Cognitive Linguists:

Fauconnier, George, & Mark Turner. 2002. The way we think: Conceptual blending and the mind's hidden complexities. New York: Basic Books.

Lakoff, George, & Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.

--. 1998. Philosophy in the flesh. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.

Langacker , Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of cognitive grammar. Volume I: Theoretical perspectives. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

--. 1991. Foundations of cognitive grammar. Volume II: Descriptive application. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a cognitive semantics. Vol. I: Concept structuring systems. Vol. II: Typology and process in concept structuring. Cambridge, MA & London: The MIT Press.

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Using a Measurement of Subjectivity in Stylistic Analysis

Claiborne Rice
(University of Louisiana at Lafayette)

Theme session participants have been asked to address the question, "What do cognitive approaches to the study of literature add to the stylistician's interpretative toolkit?" This paper will argue that the ability to provide one or two specific tools to an all-purpose toolkit does not form a strong argument for any particular approach to the analysis of literature or literary style. Rather, by providing an overarching theoretical framework that comprehends language behavior on the individual and the social scale, Cognitive Poetics facilitates communication between literary and linguistic approaches to style that proves beneficial to both. By mining discoveries within cognitive linguistics in order to utilize them for analyzing literature, Cognitive Poetics becomes a channel of new tools for literary stylistics. Likewise, characteristic approaches to literary language suggest cognitive approaches to language in general.
To illustrate this process, several texts will be analyzed using a method for the detailed measurement of subjectivity developed and described by Mirna Pit (2003a, 2003b). The principle of subjectivity as defined and developed by Langacker on the basis of data from a variety of languages has proven useful for identifying the intensity of reader interaction prompted by different poems (Rice 2002). Pit successfully applies specific measures of subjectivity to forensic language to describe the degree of involvement a speaker conveys. It will be shown that readers of poetry are aware enough of the degrees of subjectivity available for expression in language to use expressions of subjectivity in poetry for creating personas attributed to a poem's speaker or writer. The development and refining of Langacker's notion of subjectivity in both literary and non-literary analyses continues to benefit both stylistics and linguistics in general.

References
Pit, Mirna. "Textual Indications of Subjectivity and Their Relation with Causal Connectives." Multidisciplinary Approaches to Discourse. Netherlands, October 22th-25th, 2003.
Pit, Mirna. How to Express Yourself with a Causal Connective: Subjectivity
and Causal Connectives in Dutch, German and French. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003.
Rice, Claiborne. "Poetic Space: Critical Applications of Cognitive Linguistics to Poetry." Dissertation. University of Georgia, 2002.

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How Cognition Can Augment Stylistic Analysis

Michael Burke

(Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

As a mode of literary criticism, stylistics has traditionally focussed on the formal properties of style for persuasive and/or disportive ends. This is to be expected, given the fundamental rhetorical roots of stylistics and the aesthetic nature of literary texts. Indeed, even in this contextualised age of stylistic analysis, the effects of such bottom-up linguistic devices on our top-down mental processes are still very much an important part of the interpretative equation. However, with the advent of cognitive approaches to literature, some understandable confusion has arisen among a number of stylisticians. This has found form in the assumption that the addition of a cognitive dimension to stylistic analysis must, by default, mean an emphasis on 'reductiveness' in interpretation and a de-emphasis on the role that culture, language and style can play in literary meaning-making processes. This viewpoint, however, though logical, is arguably somewhat misguided.

In this essentially practical session, primarily, though not exclusively, aimed at stylisticians who are 'agnostic' or even 'sceptical' to cognitive approaches to literature, I hope to show just what a cognitive approach can add to current contextualised stylistic analysis. In order to achieve this, some relevant cognitive tools will be applied to literary texts, in conjunction with some existing stylistic ones. This will be done in an attempt to show how both approaches are in fact complementary rather than mutually exclusive. The aims of this essentially didactic presentation therefore will be to show how cognition can augment stylistic analysis and to suggest that the inclusion of a cognitive dimension in the domain of stylistics is something that should be welcomed rather than distrusted.

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Schemas in Literary Analysis: The Mutually Motivated Hypothesis

Mette Steenberg

(Aarhus Universitet)

In this paper I will argue that the most promising contribution from the cognitive sciences to the study of literature is the notion of schema. The history and development of this notion is long and has lead to various definitions: one main tendency emphasises the culturally embedded discursive representation of knowledge (scripts (Abelson & Schank, 1977), frames (Fillmore, 1977), ICM´s (Lakoff, 1987) and text-world theory (Werth, 1999)), while another main tendency emphasises the way phenomenological experience constrains semantics (Force Dynamics (Talmy, 1988) and image-schemas (Johnson, 1987)). I do not intend to survey the particular developments of these definitions here but will argue in favour of the general hypothesis: linguistic structures stand in a mutually motivated relationship with patterns of thought and behaviour. Still, how we go from the figurative to the conceptual level continues to be one of the less understood parts of the cognitive approach to the study of literature, particularly within research on metaphor the issue is controversial (cf. Steen 2002). Taking the mutually motivated hypothesis for granted (cognitive linguistics has successfully demonstrated, that the relationship of form and content is highly motivated and that linguistic forms not only re-presents ideas but actually shape the forms of our reasoning), the issue becomes less controversial. According to my working definition of schemas as dynamic, micro-narrative structures (Steenberg, forthcoming), in which I try to combine the two above-mentioned trends in schema theory, I claim that texts in general are structured according to a general schema, e.g. the barrier schema (Talmy, 1988), giving rise to numerous image-metaphors that figuratively represent resistance, impediment, letting etc. These schemas, however skeletal, develop dynamically when applied to literary texts into content dense narratives as the story unfolds by means of image-metaphors adding flesh to the schematic body. I will demonstrate how such a schema structures the text and how the schema prompts figurative language at the same time as these contribute to the unfolding of the dynamic schema.

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Textual Analysis in a Cognitive Semiotics Perspective

Line Brandt

(Center for Semiotics, Aarhus Universitet)

Using a short fictional text for exemplification, it will be demonstrated how a framework for literary analysis might take shape, unifying work done in linguistics, including cognitive semantics, traditional literary studies, and cognitive semiotics. Special attention is paid to the enunciational aspect of language, i.e. the inherent displays of subjectivity owing to the existence of a communicative situation underlying any utterance, written or spoken. An implicit condition of any piece of discourse is the presence of an enunciator, an addressee, shared attention and a temporal as well as spatial groundedness, although the latter condition is often suspended in literary enunciation. This enunciational ground affects description and evaluation ('framing'), and is also manifest in other expressions of subjectivity, such as the epistemic status of propositions, affective attitude, epistemic stance pertaining to belief investment - 'veridiction' - and origin of information - 'evidentiality'. A four-layered network of semiotic blends of comprehensive mental spaces is proposed as a diagrammatic means of illustrating the process of reading and interpreting a literary text. This diagrammatic structure is intended as an outline of a cognitive framework for studying how enunciation affects semantic content: viewpoint structure, framing, epistemic investment, affective investment, changes in evaluation due to shifts in perspective, and exploring the possibilities of enunciational structure including embedded enunciation and blended voices (cp. free indirect speech), as well as how the relation between semantic structure and rhetorical means affects the 'temperature' of a text and the style of genre, and, finally, how a reading supports subsequent literary interpretations.

This approach to the study of literature conceives of the endeavour of cognitive stylistics as two-directional: since literary text is made up of language and language is motivated by cognition, literature may serve as a resource for attaining information about the cognitive toolkit allowing these explicit manifestations. Conversely, the attentional atunement to the cognitive strategies and schemas available to us can prove a constructive supplement to unreflected artistic inspiration, encouraging skilful application of the principles and potentials discovered, which when exploited may yield advantages both for writers and for readers. It is suggested that this two-fold prospect is an essential benefit of the cognitive approach to literature: studying literature to gain insight into the mind and its inventions alike.

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Figurative Language and the Representation of Consciousness in Fiction

Elena Semino

(Lancaster University)

A central characteristic of fiction is that it can give us the illusion of accessing directly something that we cannot access in 'real' life, namely the consciousness of (fictional) others. In a recent book (Consciousness and the Novel, 2002), David Lodge has restated the centrality of the representation of consciousness to literature generally and the novel in particular, and has related it to current debates on the nature of consciousness itself within cognitive science. Lodge points out that one of the difficulties scientists have in researching consciousness is that consciousness is a subjective, first-person phenomenon, while science tends to deal with 'objective' phenomena from a third-person perspective. Literature, in contrast, typically deals with the specificity of personal experience, and therefore provides 'a record of human consciousness, the richest and most comprehensive that we have' (p. 10) and 'a kind of knowledge about consciousness which is complementary to scientific knowledge' (p. 16).

In this paper I focus specifically on literary representations of 'qualia' - the wide range of specific, qualitative experiences that we have as a result of being conscious, such as experiencing the freshness of mountain air, the pain of migraine, or the misery of unrequited love. Lodge recognizes that one of the primary means literature has to render qualia is the use of figurative language, and particularly metaphor and simile. I will discuss a range of extracts from novels where metaphors and similes are used to represent particular types of qualia, including particularly bodily/sensorial experiences such as pain (e.g. Virginia Woolf's description of neck pain as 'feeling hands tightening at the back of her neck' in 'Lappin and Lapinova'). My main aim is to investigate in more depth than Lodge does why and how metaphors and similes are used in representing qualia. In trying to answer these questions, I will draw from recent developments in metaphor theory and cognitive science.

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What are the challenges when a dub poet such as Lillian Allen wants to re-produce Jamaican English Creole in written form? When she "commits" her poetry to the page, she is faced with the paradoxes of working in a phonetic alphabet which, in English, is many things in addition to phonetic. English spellings are so complex and so highly standardised that some of their most important functions are to do with group membership and power.

Using a social semiotic approach, the paper looks at several written poems in Allen's Women Do This Every Day in which there are orthographic variations on the words "this", "you", and "rhythm". It begins with Sebba's ideological approach to creole spellings in the British context, in which these spellings are signals of ideological distance from 'English'. I go on to explore the meanings of 'English' in this light, closely relating its meanings to a range of issues in postcolonial theories of language and literacy, and to gender, sexuality, and race. This approach uses critical discourse analysis to make explicit the language issues often explored, but not rigorously described, by critics in postcolonial literature.

In this proposal we attempt to analyze some metaphorical expressions which constitute linguistic realizations of a thorny phenomenon which deserves some explanation in terms of domain ascription. Our analysis is embedded within the Cognitive Linguistics framework, where metaphor is defined in terms of a set of correspondences between a source and a target domain (see Lakoff and Johnson, 1999 and Lakoff, 1993). The case of emotions provides us with a very fruitful and illustrative domain from the point of view of metaphorical construal from the point of view of Cognitive Linguistics (see Kövecses, 1990). For instance, in the example Her own intense excitement had given way to a hollow feeling in her stomach, a hollow feeling is not a feeling which merits no attention, but a feeling which has the property of causing a feeling of hollowness. The adjective makes reference to a subdomain of the parent domain of feelings. A superficial analysis of the example can mislead us into believing that it is the metaphorical system EMOTIONS ARE CONTAINERS that allows for the largely intangible domain of feelings to be reconceptualized in image-schematic terms. In this light, a hollow feeling is perceived as if it were lacking importance since it is devoid of any content inside. However, a more refined examination of this occurrence leads us to conclude that the subdomain which is profiled by the adjective calls for a different metaphor in order to be felicitously interpreted: A PERSON IS A CONTAINER FOR EMOTIONS. If an emotion causes someone to feel as if hollow, the person is seen as a container empty of emotions. Finally, the phrase in her stomach makes us refine our analysis further and take the metaphor DIFFERENT (RELEVANT) PARTS OF THE BODY ARE CONTAINERS FOR EMOTIONS as the underlying motivating device. We also consider other examples like There was a sad, empty hole (inside me) in the same light as the previous example. In it, a person is mapped onto a container as mediated by the PEOPLE ARE CONTAINERS metaphor. The well-understood concept of a hole inside a bounded region serves as a model for the comprehension of the more abstract cognitive domain of bad feelings. It is interesting to observe that bad feeling acts both as the corresponding target entity of hole, as well as a more specific subdomain of the parent domain of person. Moreover, the tendency of blending theory research to often focus on novel and idiosyncratic conceptualizations leads us to think that all these examples could be analyzed within this framework. Blending theorists would assert that it is the emergent structure of the blend that makes this construal feasible (see Fauconnier, 1994 and Ruiz de Mendoza, 1998 for a different version of blending). The example Jane wanted to fill in the hollow of longing that pierced John is analyzed in this connection.

This proposal studies the lexical item empty within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. With this aim in mind, we account for the meaning of this lexeme in terms of some of the structuring principles of reality which Lakoff (1987: 68) proposes, mainly metaphor, metonymy, and image-schemas. Metaphor has been defined as a mapping across domains where a conceptual domain, the target, which is usually abstract, draws some conceptual material from a more concrete domain of experience, the source (see Lakoff and Johnson, 1999 and Lakoff, 1987). There has been some controversy regarding the definition of metonymy. Ruiz de Mendoza (2000) has argued that metonymy is a mapping within domains. The criterial feature which distinguishes metaphor from metonymy is the domain-external nature of the former and the domain-internal character of the latter. Finally, image-schemas are preconceptual knowledge structures based on experience (see Johnson, 1987). First, the FULL-EMPTY image-schema has been found to lie at the base of the adjectival occurrences of the lexical item empty. In turn, this image-schematic structure provides the basic blueprint for the construction of some metaphorical systems (e.g. THE MIND IS A CONTAINER FOR THOUGHTS and THE MIND IS A CONTAINER FOR EMOTIONALLY LOADED THOUGHTS, as in Her mind was completely blank, empty of thought or feeling). In the case of expressions like I feel empty, where no specification of the item of which someone feels empty is provided, we are encouraged to resolve this instance of semantic incompleteness, as guided by a relevance-driven process which is partly cued by the presence of the verb feel, and recover the interpretation I feel empty of emotion and energy as part of the explicature of the expression. Second, empty as a verb can be studied in terms of Dik's (1997) distinction between actions and processes. It is interesting to observe that both actions like He emptied the contents out into the palm of his hand and processes like The Washougal empties into the Columbia River near Portland can be studied in terms of Goldberg's (1995) caused-motion construction, which can be interpreted in the light of the interaction of several image-schemas (FORCE, PATH, CONTAINER). Finally, the noun empties is understood as undergoing a process of metonymical development whereby the lexeme empties stands for empty bottles. This would be an instance of what Ruiz de Mendoza (2000) has called target-in-source metonymy.

Crashaw is a metaphysical poet in the non-Donnean or non-Herbertian sense. While Herbert's poetry exhibits an art of plainness, Crashaw's is flamboyant, luxuriant, and extravagant. Also, while in Donne's imagery the brain dominates, the senses govern Crashaw's imagery. In elucidating Crashaw's lavishly sensuous imagery, much attention has been paid to his poem "The Weeper," "the most notoriously baroque poem in English." Austin Warren's comments aptly encapsulate the scholarship on "The Weeper": "Crashaw's imagery runs in streams; the streams run together; image turns into image. . . . By temperament and conviction, he was a believer in the miraculous; and his aesthetic method may be interpreted as a genuine equivalent of his belief, as its translation into a rhetoric of metamorphosis." Metamorphosis is a basic nature of the grotesque image: "the grotesque starts when the exaggeration reaches fantastic dimension, [say,] the human nose being transformed into a snout or beak," as Bakhtin states. Critics such as Praz and Warren have touched upon the grotesque quality of Crashaw's imagery in their essays. I propose to go one step further to expound upon his grotesque imagery. The term "grotesque" derives from grottesco, which was coined in Renaissance Italy to refer to a style of ornamentation that consisted of human and animal forms, fantastically interwoven with fruits and flowers. A jumble of disparate and discordant elements is therefore the sine qua non of the grotesque. Philip Thompson calls our attention to the most central nature of the grotesque: "the unresolved clash of incompatibles in work and in response." It is this unsettled conflict of incompatibles that separates the grotesque from other compositions, such as caricature or irony, which are also born of some sort of juxtaposition of opposites. A good example of the grotesque image is Giuseppe Arcimboldo's transformation of a human head into a bunch of fruits and vegetables in his painting Summer. Arcimboldo's painting exhibits a rhetoric of metamorphosis wherein the metonymic congruence of fruits and a man is rendered metaphorically incongruous. This is exactly the case in Crashaw's imagery of tears: "Eyes are vocall, Teares have Tongues." My paper is an attempt to elucidate Crashaw's grotesque images with recourse to Arcimboldo's paintings and thereby to create a conversation between poetry and painting.

First of all, I would like to say that I am quite a beginner in making researches, that is why I am deeply interested in gaining the experience in the field of studying literary works. My research interests include Intercultural reading and empirical studies of literary texts.

As all the members of Ukrainian REDES Group are affiliated to the Chair of Lexicology and Stylistics of the English language at Kyiv National Linguistic University, the purpose of my study is to find linguo-stylistic peculiarities of ambiguity creation in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. I want to prove empirically that people after reading the text are more likely to think that the governess is a bit crazy and there are no ghosts in the story. It would be quite difficult to read the whole text, so I think I will give two extracts to each of two groups of people who will participate in my research. My preliminary hypothesis is - the ghosts are the creation of the governess's imagination.

At the present stage, I have studied the theoretical material and am now deciding what passages to choose for reading. I am also working on the questionnaire, which will precede and follow the reading of the extracts. Another point is choosing people for the research. I would like to make my research intercultural, that is why I want to have two groups of people with different nationalities. I hope that other members of the REDES project will help me to do this.

Mendes, Milena

Love affairs characterized by an explicit age gap between a man and a woman may not be taken equally by different societies. Besides, people's attitudes might differ according to who is older or younger, as in some cultures it is common to see alliances between much older men and younger women, whereas the opposite is socially criticized. As literary texts reflect to a certain extent cultural backgrounds or critically reflect on it, they might push readers towards accepting or condemning certain behavioural patterns.

The present empirical study aims at investigating readers' reactions towards age gap relationships in real and fictional worlds. In addition, it aims to demonstrate whether the audience's worldview is influenced by literary texts and whether their attitudes change after reading.

The research is carried out among students from the Humanities in Brazil and Ukraine. Our initial hypothesis is that, as these students are constantly in touch with written texts, their attitudes will be affected by the literary passages. The participants will answer questions before and after reading extracts in which relationships marked by an explicit age gap are described as they depict involvement between an older man/older woman and a younger woman/younger man. As the investigation is carried out in these two countries, assumably different in their national traditions and mentality, the results may also enable us to investigate cultural differences and/or similarities in relation to this issue.

J.R.R. Tolkien does not enjoy a reputation as one of the mid-twentieth century's moderately important literary figures; he is more commonly dismissed as merely a commercially-successful bestseller. His writing style in particular is seldom given much attention in literary critical discourse. Recently, there has been a renewed interest in the author and his works, arising from the success of the cinematic installments of The Lord of the Rings. However, the author's current popularity may in fact act as a deterrent to critical activity. This paper aims to revisit Tolkien's stylistic virtues as a writer.

Critics like Stimpson (1969) and Raffel (1977) have made paradoxical claims about the stylistic value of The Lord of the Rings. On the one hand, they say, the work is couched in highly archaic forms; on the other hand, that the author's banal use of language makes the work unliterary. In an attempt to understand the linguistic motivation which lies behind Tolkien's stylistic choices, Shippey (2003) studies Tolkien's pronouncements on the topic of 'sound and sense', but not always accurately. In this paper, I wish to challenge some common critical assumptions about the language of The Lord of the Rings.

I will be exploring two key issues which can help reassess Tolkien's reputation as a literary writer: Tolkien's use of 'high style' and his handling of iconicity. I will begin by examining Tolkien's beliefs about the value of high style when writing about 'heroic' matters. By analyzing examples of high style in key passages of the novel in the light of Tolkien's stylistic precepts, some critical objections to Tolkien's archaism can be overcome.

Despite Tolkien's documented interest in the relation between sound and sense (i.e. modes of iconicity), critics to date have not examined or considered closely the importance of sound-sense relationships in his work. In the second part of the paper I will lay out some details of Tolkien's engagement with the topic in an attempt to further Shippey's work, and then show how his beliefs about 'phonetic fitness' served to structure and determine his writing strategies.

In her essay "Strangeness," Lyn Hejinian writes, "metonymy conserves perception of the worlds of the objects, conserves their quiddity, their particular precisions, it is a scientific description" (40). In cognitive linguistics there exists paralellism between visual and intellectual operations. Most of all "vision involves the remarkable ability to focus at will on various features of our perceptual array, to pick out one object from a background, or to differentiate fine features in their early categorizations. All of these operations have parallels in intellectual acts," as Mark Johnson in "The Body in the Mind" wrote (108). Seeing is a metonymic act. Our eyes always focus on a chosen element from a perceptual field, selecting the most salient features of the object. "We see only the leaves and branches of the trees close in around the house" (My Life 12).

In my presentation I suggest that postmodern aesthetics of bits, scraps, echoes and overtones favors metonymy, which maintains "the intactness and discreteness of particulars," over metaphor based on a more fixed code ("Strangeness" 38).

Due to its randomness and arbitrariness; its paratactic nature, metonymy, much more efficiently than a metaphor, conveys an indeterminacy of referent. In metonymy signifiers are related to one another in a contiguous way. The principle is combination rather than selection. Metonymy is not aligned with an associative, so called paradigmatic axis, but rather a syntagmatic axis, based on the property of linearity and combination.

Freeing a signifier from the conventions of the signified; providing the particulars, with "multiple vanishing points;" supplying a whole context of associations metonymy enables a contemporary poet to preserve all the hypothetical meanings in their indeterminacy ("Strangeness" 38).

By looking at the current studies of metonymy in cognitive linguistics and selected poems by Lyn Hejinian and Jorie Graham, I will show how metonymy suits the postmodern "rhizomatic" aesthetics which Jorie Graham in "Notes on the Reality of the Self," calls "the dance of non-discovery" (Materialism 160).

Flickering bits, motes, sparkles of light are the dominant mode of perception in those two poets. Precisely metonymy is used to convey such a mode of perception; to convey acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying poetics of postmodernism.

In the 2003 summer issue of Poetics Today Richard van Oort claims that the cognitive paradigm, in its current constitution, is not ready to revolutionalize literary studies, "ultimately because the cognitive model lacks a theory of representation adequate to the task of interpreting human culture" (p. 239). I will argue that a cognitive poetics has to be grounded in such a diachronic theory of representation, rather than remaining with synchronic descriptions of causal mechanisms in representation. I will also argue that such a grounding is necessary for the development of a cognitive poetics in relation to traditional stylistics as well as in relation to traditional - and poststructural - literary theory.

First, referring to van Oort 2003, Deacon 1997, Gardenfors 1996, 2000a, Tomasello 1999, Gans 1999, we shall see that a description of the originary anthropological function of the sign as emerging from a deferral of indexical reference involves a critique of cognitive models that - relying exclusively on ontogenetic development, excluding phylogeny - claim basic perceptual categories to be re-presented in language, as constructed by emergent metaphors (cf. e.g. Lakoff & Johnson 1980, Turner 1996). We need to be careful when making parallels between symbolic functions and sensimotor functions so that we do not reverse the causal order as regards the origin of symbolic categories. That is, when dealing with universal categories like metaphor and narrative we should, as van Oort puts it, counter biological reductionism not with cultural idealism but with anthropological minimalism.

Secondly, also building on the diachronic grounding of representation, the cognitive 'turn' in linguistics/semiotics should be considered in relation to a semiotic 'turn' in cognitive science (see e.g. Brandt 2000, Soneson 1998, 2000, Gardenfors 2000b). The project of a cognitive poetics remains a 'stone-age humanism' if we do not acknowledge that we have to start theorizing from a minimal anthropological thesis as regards the dawn of man and proceed to a cognitive semiotics where literary (situated) acts of communication are seen both in terms of how we cognize the world and how we construct meaning in this world. Here, one basic tenet in our daily practice - be it in relation to stylistics or literary theory - must be that meaning comes before truth, which means that a cognitive poetics, semantico-semiotically, cannot be reduced to presymbolic cognitive processes. This means that cognitive poetics seen only as an extension of contextualized stylistics runs the risk of using cognitive science simply as a crutch if it assimilates terminologies of e.g. conceptual metaphor and blending, and, at the same time, shies away from the fact that human categories are grounded in the economy of an unrestricted sign-system.

Having outlined the necessary background in a diachronic theory of the sign, I proceed to discuss in more practical terms the relation of cognitive poetics to stylistics and literary theory. I claim that cognitive poetics offers more inclusive semantico-semiotic possibilities than quasi-cognitive models of 'critical' discourse analysis. The tools and methods afforded by cognitive science must be our first concern when we consider methodologies that are not restricted by traditional theoretical approaches. Cognitive poetics has a relation to introspective hermenutics, and we must see to it that our cognitive models of e.g. conceptual metaphor and blending are functional so that we can use one tool for each specific problem we come across, and we must also relate functional relations between methodologies.

Cognitive poetics cannot be an 'appendix' to stylistics, neither can it be seen to add to literary studies if is not introduced in relation to a comprehensive theory of the sign. The objective here is to show the necessity of an anthropo-semiotic grounding for cognitive poetics - meta-theoretically as well as in brief practical analyses.

Broadly speaking, my work in this area aims to show how 'stylistics' can benefit from developments in 'corpus linguistics'. Specifically, I have been focussing on an empirical methodology for identifying what might be the (statistically) 'key' words of a text, using the Keywords facility in Mike Scott's WordSmith Tools (1999). At PALA (2001) in Budapest, I related the notion of keywords to Enkvist's (1964, 1973) 'style-markers' (items which result from a significant differential between the densities of linguistic features in a text and the densities of corresponding linguistic features in a contextually related norm). I also explored the keywords of character-talk in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (e.g. Romeo's top keywords are 'beauty', 'love' and 'death'). Since then, I have been extending this work in two directions. Firstly, the analysis I could do on Romeo and Juliet was constrained by the fact that no character speaks a vast quantity of words, and so it was not statistically viable to explore, for example, relationships between keywords. To resolve this, I decided to focus on the dramatic character-type of 'lovers', and so collected lovers-talk from two other love-tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra and Othello, and also from love-comedies (e.g. A Midsummer Night's Dream). Secondly, in my Budapest study, I noted that keywords tended to fall into particular semantic fields (e.g. in Romeo and Juliet, some of the Nurse's keywords relate to bodily matters). This led me to wonder whether, if I tagged words for semantic field (i.e. added semantic annotation) and then found out which semantic fields were key, I would find out something different. This issue relates to discussions in stylistics about form and content. My paper in New York will present some results from this extended work.

Proper names are used in many ways (Vandelanotte & Willemse 2002, Dancygier 2003); they are also often used metonymically (Washington for U.S. government). In longer stretches of text, though, where narrative comprehension requires set-up and maintenance of complex frames (Emmott 1997), proper names can evoke frames and schemas which structure the narrative itself. Such cases are the topic of this paper.

Several uses will be considered, but the paper will focus on those which also involve the processes of blending and decompression (defined in Fauconnier and Turner 2002). Decompression (or a conceptual "split") allowing two frames to be profiled simultaneously is prompted when two names can refer to one person (e.g., a stage name, or pen name, and the real name). In a story, the two names may evoke different periods in a person's life or contrasting perceptions of the public and private persona. In J. Raban's novel, a character looks at a new acquaintance who used to be a singer: "Diana Pym and Julie Midnight... They sat together on his mother's sofa [...], and he couldn't make them coalesce into a single image." These incompatible perceptions of Diana (and the two names) are then consistently used in structuring the ensuing narrative.

Proper names also play a frame-evoking role in specialized constructions. At the end of a scene where the narrator and his girlfriend have dinner together before he leaves for a long trip, the narrator comments: "Dinner was our Reno. Before the check came, we'd had our divorce". The first sentence is an example of a construction (easily replicated in sentences such as The exam was Bob's Waterloo), where the type of experience evoked by the proper name (Reno=immediate divorce, Waterloo=irrevocable defeat), originally attributed to another participant in a familiar frame, is now attributed to the referent of the genitive form our or Bob's. The paper presents such constructions as relying (1) on mechanisms of conceptual integration (see Fauconnier and Turner's [2002] discussion of their XYZ construction); (2) on the so far undocumented use of the genitive form (cf. Nikiforidou 1991); and (3) on frame-metonymic evocation prompted by proper names. In the narrative, the construction frames the events in a new way (e.g., the dinner scene is not interpreted as the end of the affair until Reno is mentioned). It also creates a blended frame (restaurant scenario plus "divorce"), which is then used as a contextual frame in the ensuing discourse.

Andrea Camilleri is a Sicilian novelist who has written several crime novels featuring Chief Inspector Salvo Montalbano as the official police hero. The Montalbano novels are of interest to the stylistician for a variety of reasons: Montalbano is a development of the prototypical detective whose broad developmental line may be traced from Sherlock Holmes, through Reeder, touching on Marlowe, on to Maigret and then Carvalho. This development is of interest from the standpoint of analysing form and structure of the crime novel. However, this developmental line is also of interest inasmuch as it unveils changes in the behaviour of the detective which reflect changes in the world the detective lives in. Thus Montalbano provides a historical and social overview of modern Sicilian society. More important still, the fact that Montalbano is a prototype extends his sphere of relevance from the purely local (Sicilian), to the national, and even international, spheres, despite the fact that he does not set foot outside his native island. This is all the more noteworthy since, paradoxically, the language in which the novel is written is a mixture of Sicilian and Italian in order to capture the "flavour" of the communicative exchanges and their social significance. In this day and age of globalisation, the novel stands for the rights of individual and local identity. Finally, Camilleri is an excellent writer from a linguistic standpoint, deploying foregrounding to great effect. The article will examine one aspect of Camilleri's linguistic technique. Employing Short and Semino's (in press) model of speech and thought presentation, the article will investigate the literary/textual/communicative functions performed by the deployment of S&TP in the Montalbano novels. Time permitting, an attempt will be made to uncover whether there is any significant link between S&TP and the other aspects of the novels mentioned above.

This paper looks back to Jakobson's (1960) classical formulation of the poetic function of language as a solution to the question of `literariness' or `verbal art'. The poetic function is the aesthetics of natural language. It looks forward in that it treats Jakobsonian aesthetics as the input to pragmatic processing, agreeing with Kiparsky 1987 that this is its major deficiency. These two dimensions are used to consider the `logical status of fictional discourse' (Searle, 1975, Schmidt, 1976, Rorty, 1982). My aim is to work out in full the tacit Jakobson position that fictionality is the automatic outcome of the poetic function to the degree that its empirical criterion is expressed in terms of the referential function. Fiction is aestheticized reference and truth. The poetic function is the set (Einstellung) to the message as such, and hence is intentional. Fictionality occurs only to the degree that this is also empirically oriented to the `denotative' machinery of language. This problematizes the referential use of language to various degrees, and hence ostensively demands extra pragmatic processing. Referential machinery includes referring expressions, pro-forms, deixis, presupposition triggers, word and sentence sense, background information, everything in terms of which truth conditions are grasped and propositional attitudes assigned. Empirically, non-fictional reference becomes equivalent to fictional reference in a reciprocal two-way relationship, a constitutive device within a text. This makes truth ambiguous as between literal truth, where the referential function dominates, and the truth of fiction. Fiction -aestheticized reference and truth claims - are also held to be seriously true, but not transparently so. Thus, fictions, although not usable as the basis for action, can however in their turn affect perceptions of the plausibility of what is in the `truth box'. Faced with this problematic input, the search for relevance is altered, especially with respect to the explicatures involved in constructing a propositional form and embedding it in attitudes. In serious art writing, where the poetic function is dominant, relevance can then best be achieved by treating the text as `world-metaphorical'. It is an analog of what we believe is true of the actual world, to which it is strictly equivalent, in terms of which it must be read, and which it can actually effect. Fact and fiction can be in dynamic interplay. This sets the stage for a wide array of weak implicatures (Sperber and Wilson, 1996).

For decades literature and linguistics have been regarded as separate areas of study. However, in recent times some authors have explored the possibility of applying a linguistic theory to the analysis of literary works (cf. Steen 1994, Semino & Culpeper, 2002). It is the purpose of this paper to show how the analytical tools offered by Cognitive Semantics provide the grounds for the construction of characters and shed new light on some aspects of the structure of a play. In order to do so, we shall apply Johnson's (1987) theory of image-schemas to the study of the dramatic structure of Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion and of the development of its two main characters, i.e. Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle. Each of them will be found to act according to the logic of a different image schema, namely, the circle and the path image schemas, which explains in some way the problems of their relationship and the end of the play. Furthermore, we shall argue that the force schema together with its related image-schemas have a prominent role in the weaving of the plot; and we shall observe that the reactions of most of the characters of the play can also be interpreted in relation to the logic of the FORCE image-schema. We shall also contend that the whole play is built on Lakoff's (1993) metaphor purposeful activities are journeys. Finally, on the basis of our analysis we shall explore in what ways Cognitive Semantics can help to develop an adequate theory of literature.

Metonymy has long been considered one of the most important mechanisms for meaning extension (Taylor, 1989; Bartsch, 2002). Initially, the great majority of attention to this phenomenon was mainly devoted to studying its role in polysemy and semantic change (cf. Stern, 1931; Ullmann, 1962). Within Cognitive Semantics the relationship between metonymy and polysemy was first analysed by Brugman (1981) who contended that all the spatial senses of the preposition "over" are connected by means of metonymic mappings. However, the study of metonymy as a tool for other processes of meaning extension such as word recategorisation has largely been neglected. In this paper, we shall employ some of the analytical tools provided by Cognitive Linguistics in order to explore the role metonymy plays in two patterns of recategorisation in English: the shift from noun to verb (e.g. He turned his head away from them vs. He headed the ball to Andrew) and the subcategorial conversion of a noun from countable to mass (e.g. She's got two cats vs. There was cat all over the road) . On the basis of our analysis we shall contend that the basic motivation for conversion in English is the shortening of the conceptual distance that exists between the word forms that encode the source and target domains of a metonymic mapping. We shall also suggest that subcategorial conversion only takes place in those cases where the target is a subdomain of the source. We shall further argue that conversion may be motivated both by the search for prominence and the economy principle. Finally, we shall discuss the consequences of metonymy in recategorisation both on morphological and syntactic grounds.

The fundamental concern of my analysis is how referential semantics (Larson and Segal) accounts for the language in Keats' ode "To Autumn," a poem in which Keats' particular mindset is to employ a method, or poetic idea of language, his concept of negative capability. Keats' claim is that poetic truth arises when one is unfettered by the linear constraints of rational or truth conditional language that leads one to a proposed knowledge. "I mean Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteris [sic], doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason" (Letters, 193). Some literary critics, including Helen Vendler, suggest that Keats finally achieves this poetic effect and that it is embodied in his ode "To Autumn."

"To Autumn" is an intriguing poem in which to apply a referential approach to semantics precisely because the premises of referential semantics are counter to the concept of negative capability. I begin my analysis with referential semantics' premise of compositionality, which strives to trace a tight fit between syntax and semantics, so that the meaning of "To Autumn" is intertwined and inseparable from the poem's form. The premise of compositionality is further predicated on formal logic's predicate/argument structures, and complicates a referential analysis of the ode from the outset, since "To Autumn" is missing the argument side of the equation. The analysis of the missing referent propels my inquiry into the issue of "empty proper names" as a way to meaning within the referential framework. This approach, however, presents theoretical problems of its own.

Through my analysis, I propose that these two polar ways of theorizing language, while initially creating a fundamental paradox, eventually lead to a point of convergence within the concept of deferral.

Cognitive stylistics, a rapidly expanding field, approaches literary texts with a unique explanatory power of how readers perceive and interpret literary work(s). This paper focuses on the process of characterization in two narratives: J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Jeffrey Archer's Kane and Abel. It draws upon a cognitive stylistics model of characterization proposed by Culpeper (2001/2002) among other pioneering cognitive stylis