Peter Stockwell

University of Nottingham | Notts · Centre for Research in Applied Linguistics (CRAL)

This article takes its cue from David Miall’s influential 2011 paper, ‘Enacting the other: towards an aesthetics of feeling in literary reading’, in Elisabeth Schellekens and Peter Goldie (eds) The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 285–298. There, Miall considers the workings of readerly empathy with fi...

Digital Teaching for Linguistics re-imagines the teaching of linguistics in a digital environment. It provides both an introduction to digital pedagogy and a discussion of technologically driven teaching practices that could be applied to any field of study.

The representation of non-standard and regional accent and dialect in literary fiction has been framed mainly sociolinguistically and treated as an index of authenticity, within an account of characterisation. The reader’s attitude to such speakers in literary fiction is manipulated narratorially and authorially. Since readerly effects, impressions...

We propose a lexico-grammatical approach to speech in fiction based on the centrality of ‘fictional speech-bundles’ as the key element of fictional talk. To identify fictional speech-bundles, we use three corpora of 19th-century fiction that are available through the corpus stylistic web application CLiC (Corpus Linguistics in Context). We focus on...

Future innovations in teaching and learning will evolve where new thinking in teaching, new approaches to curriculum design and management, and new technology come together in alignment. This two-day conference brings together university teachers and educators, learning technologists, practitioners and students to share the concepts, practices and...

This paper introduces the web application CLiC, which we developed as part of a research project bringing together insights from both cognitive poetics and corpus stylistics, with Dickens's novels as a case study. CLiC supports the analysis of discourse in narrative fiction with search options that make it possible to focus on stretches of text wit...

Perhaps more than almost any other subject, the study of English language in a native-speaker context has been much debated, ideologised and caught up in issues of morality, citizenship, nationalism, liberty and identity. It is interesting to think why. The most obvious reason—and unlike almost every other field—is that the ‘English language’ is bo...

We suggest an innovative approach to literary discourse by using corpus linguistic methods to address research questions from cognitive poetics. In this article, we focus on the way that readers engage in mind-modelling in the process of characterisation. The article sets out our cognitive poetic model of characterisation that emphasises the contin...

Stylistics has become the most common name for a discipline which at various times has been termed ‘literary linguistics’, ‘rhetoric’, ‘poetics’, ‘literary philology’ and ‘close textual reading’. This Handbook is the definitive account of the field, drawing on linguistics and related subject areas such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, educat...

In this final chapter, the editors of the Handbook reflect on the state of the discipline of stylistics in the world. Handbook of Stylistics: Is stylistics now a discipline, rather than an interdiscipline? Peter Stockwell: We are so used to thinking of stylistics as an interdiscipline and as interdisciplinarity as an inherently good thing that I th...

Modern stylistics is in the process of emerging completely from the shadows of the New Critical prohibitions on discussing the intentional and psychological fallacies in literary reading. Informed by cognitive linguistics and the psychology of cognition, a strong tradition of cognitive poetics has become established within stylistics, serving as a...

Stylisticians were among the first to draw on the insights emerging from cognitive science in order to explore literary works. Recent years have witnessed a wider diffusion of the cognitive turn across literary scholarship, with developments into literary cultural studies and historiography. Unfortunately, this has sometimes been accompanied by a r...

This paper reviews some key issues in the current study of cognitive poetics． It first explores the range of cognitive poetics，emphasizing the centrality of textuality and texture in cognitive poetics． Then it follows to outline different approaches to cognitive poetics and put forward some important principles of cognitive poetics． Lastly，it concl...

This paper places the position adopted by the younger Jakobson in contrast with his more famous later statements, in order to examine the effects of his legacy. While the analytical and structural consequences of Jakobson's work in literary scholarship have proven immensely valuable, there are also some aspects of humanity, consciousness and emotio...

Assuming no prior knowledge, books in the series offer an accessible overview of the subject, with activities, study questions, sample analyses, commentaries and key readings - all in the same volume. The innovative and flexible 'two-dimensional' structure is built around four sections - introduction, development, exploration and extension - which...

The application of cognitive science to literary scholarship in the form of a cognitive poetics offers the opportunity for accounting for many features of literary reading that have been rendered only in vague or impressionistic terms in the past. In this paper, an argument for cognitive poetics is made, with a focus on the affective and experienti...

IntroductionA Brief History of StylisticsThe Status of Stylistic AnalysisSome Examples of Stylistic PracticeEmerging Work in Stylistics

The founder of Cognitive Poetics, Reuven Tsur, has seen his project broaden and evolve over the last quarter-century. Some of these developments run counter to Tsur's continuing thinking, and he has been critical of some of the work that now goes under the name `cognitive poetics'. This paper is partly a response to criticisms made by Tsur specific...

Cognitive poetics, the application of cognitive science to illuminate the study of literary reading, is maturing as a discipline. This paper argues that cognitive poetics is best seen as the latest development in the progressive evolution of stylistics. The endpoint of the process represents the return of rhetoric to the centre of literary scholars...

Historically, literary stylistics has achieved success around the world largely because of its capacity for teaching the English language to foreign learners in an engaging and motivated way. Placing lexico-grammatical principles in the context of patterns of meaning in genuine texts has allowed teachers to engage students with formal grammar and r...

Peter Stockwell is Professor of Literary Linguistics at the University of Nottingham and Head of the Modern English Language section. His recent book publications include Language in theory (with Mark Robson, Routledge 2005), Cognitive poetics (Routledge 2002), Sociolinguistics (Routledge 2002), The poetics of science fiction (Longman 2000), and co...

Peter Stockwell is Professor of Literary Linguistics at the University of Nottingham, and Head of the Modern English Language section. His recent book publications include Language in theory (with Mark Robson, Routledge 2005), Cognitive poetics (Routledge 2002), Sociolinguistics (Routledge 2002), The poetics of science fiction (Longman 2000), and c...

This chapter develops a broadly text world theoretical account of the conceptual attachment that readers make with literary works, in order further to specify the nature of the reader-text complex and its cognitive dynamics. The notion of identification is crucial as a means of capturing the nature of the relationship that is created between a read...

This chapter explores the cognitive mechanics that readers must engage in when experiencing fictional literary works and the beings which inhabit them. It offers a new, cognitively informed model of viewpoint, especially directed at the relationship of readers and characters. It uses the discussion to try to find a way between regarding characters...

It is clear that there is an increasing divergence between the concerns and discourse of professional readers of literature and the experience engaged in by natural readers. In particular, natural readers foreground emotional and motivational aspects of literary works, areas which are neglected or poorly handled in the academy. This paper explores...

Speculative cosmology is a sub-genre of science fiction that particularly focuses on the difficulties for the deployment of existing knowledge in reading. This article assesses the usefulness of competing models of world-monitoring in order to arrive at a usable framework for discussing the particular issues in science fictional reading. It is sugg...

All of these historical contexts mean that Milton has a pivotal place in English literature. He has been claimed for just about every critical or theoretical position: he has been connected to the late Renaissance and the metaphysical poets; he has been appropriated as a proto-Romantic; his Protestant testimony has placed him at the heart of religi...

Outlines the features of "pulpstyle" and its continuing influence on later science fiction. Considers some science fiction texts that explicitly address language issues. These ideas are related to practical techniques of using science fiction in the language classroom. (Author/VWL)

At the turn of the millennium, the two most rapidly developing fields of modern linguistics are Cognitive Linguistics (CL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Both fields are relatively new and innovative. Both claim to offer a radical new direction for the study of language and communication, and both effect this by widening the traditional con...

In the area of linguistics and language teaching, science fiction is useful in very many ways. An obvious way is that it sets up many complex and rich worlds and outlines the sorts of adjustments that language must make in those contexts. It thus draws a strong link between language and context; it shows how the construction of reality is largely a...

The Invariance Hypothesis was originally proposed by George Lakoff and Mark Turner in 1989. Since then, a range of versions has evolved so that there are currently both strong and weak statements of it. In general, the Invariance Hypothesis suggests a constraint on the information carried in a metaphorical mapping, as modelled in cognitive linguist...

L'A. tente de revoir l'approche traditionnelle de l'etude de la reference et suggere un reorientation du domaine de la semantique. Son analyse est basee sur deux grands principes: se rapprocher le plus possible de l'utilisation reelle du langage (comment les personnes utilisent le langage pour referencer), attacher une grande importance au point de...

A principle of isomorphism is identified as a feature of the reception of texts in the reading process. Principally a mapping of elements or domains, this can be seen to underlie the textual features of explicit surface metaphors, implied metaphors, metaphoric readings of texts, perceived co-operation and coherence. The latter two levels are less o...