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Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Literary Studies: State of the Art in Cognitive Poetics

June 2009

DOI:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199738632.013.0045

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Los Angeles Valley College

The emergence of cognitive linguistics has encouraged the development of new relations between literature and linguistics. Just as literary texts may serve as legitimate data for understanding the principles of language structure and use, linguistic analysis offers new perspectives on literary production, interpretation, reception, and evaluation. Although "literature" in its broadest sense refers to all written texts, this article restricts its scope to the more narrowly focused term used to cover the literary genres of fiction, poetry, and drama, written instances of humor, multimedia forms such as film, and religious writings that display literary qualities, such as the Bible and mystic poetry. All these writings are oriented toward the expressive, the emotive, and the aesthetic; it is here that the more inclusive approach of cognitive poetics may serve as a guide for further developments in the interdisciplinary area of linguistics and literature. This article also explores prototypicality and the notion of literature, conceptual structure in human cognition and narrative, metaphor and blending in literary texts, and embodiment, iconicity, and neurology in literary form and affect.

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Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1427409

In Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, 1175-1202. Oxford

and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

CHAPTER 45

COGNITIVE LINGUISTIC APPROACHES TO LITERARY STUDIES:

STATE OF THE ART IN COGNITIVE POETICS

MARGARET H. FREEMAN

1. INTRODUCTION

In his statement, “Language is the child of the literary mind,” Turner (1991, 1996) reverses the traditional view that

literature is a special, exotic subcategory of language by arguing that human language capabilities arose from the

cognitive mapping projections of parable and story. Although Turner’s argument has not as yet received wide

acceptance in either field of linguistics or literature, the emergence of Cognitive Linguistics has encouraged the

development of new relations between the two disciplines (see Geeraerts 1999 for a comprehensive survey of the

historical development of linguistic semantics and literary theories). Just as literary texts may serve as legitimate

data for understanding the principles of language structure and use, linguistic analysis offers new perspectives on

literary production, interpretation, reception, and evaluation (Bizup and Kintgen 1993; Hart 1995; Jahn 1997; Crane

and Richardson 1999; Jackson 2000).

Historically, a certain amount of tension has existed between the disciplines of linguistics and literature. For

those of us engaged in bridging the two, the particular form this tension takes—namely, that literary criticism

contributes nothing to linguistic enquiry, and vice versa—has always seemed anomalous. However, this anomaly

may have roots deeper than being simply a matter of turf wars. Recently, Burrows (2003) has characterized the split

between scientific method and literary criticism as a comparison between Descartes’s retiring to his ‘stove’ to

contemplate the foundations of knowledge and Montaigne’s retiring to his tower to write his Essays:

Descartes’s stove and Montaigne’s library tower have given us two ways of living and thinking that are at

root divergent. Stove people think that you can strip everything away and rebuild reality from precepts; tower

people reckon that writing about and exploring or refining beliefs is the best you can do. For tower people,

the process of writing and arguing is what thinking is; it is not concluding. (Burrows 2003: 21)

Though the ways of the stove and the tower may appear fundamentally incompatible, this chapter surveys recent

work in applying cognitive linguistic approaches to literature that carry with them both the air of the tower and the

heat of the stove.

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1427409

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Literary critics have long been familiar with such topics as perspective, point of view, flashbacks,

foreshadowing, etc. that cognitive linguists are just now exploring. One question that inevitably arises is what new

insights Cognitive Linguistics provides in literary studies that literary criticism has not already discovered. The

corollary, what literary criticism can contribute to cognitive linguistics, is almost always never asked (but see Brandt

and Brandt 2005a). In its focus on the processes of literary creation, interpretation, and evaluation, Cognitive

Linguistics contributes scientific explanations for the findings of literary critics and thus provides a means whereby

their knowledge and insights might be seen in the context of a unified theory of human cognition and language. To

this extent, the stove is not incompatible with the tower; to the contrary, neither functions completely without the

other.

Although ‘literature’ in its broadest sense refers to all written texts, this chapter restricts its scope to the more

narrowly focused term used to cover the literary genres of fiction, poetry, and drama, written instances of humor,

multimedia forms such as film, and religious writings that display literary qualities, such as the Bible and mystic

poetry. All these writings are oriented toward the expressive, the emotive, and the aesthetic; it is here that the more

inclusive approach of Cognitive Poetics, particularly as practiced by Tsur (1992, 1998, 2003), may serve as a guide

for further developments in the interdisciplinary area of linguistics and literature. As Hamilton (2000: 3) notes,

“Cognitive poetics can provide a sensible epistemology for the event of interpretation.”

The past few years have seen an explosion in interest in cognitive approaches to literature.

These approaches

include the development of methodologies for describing both the production and reception of literary texts. Since

the work presented in this chapter describes a symbiotic relationship between literary and linguistic objectives, I

have organized it according to challenges common to both. Each section highlights aspects important to literary and

linguistic study and describes work that suggests possible directions for future study.

2. PROTOTYPICALITY AND THE NOTION OF LITERATURE

Several researchers have turned their attention to illuminating the nature of literature and its various genres through

prototypicality theory as opposed to a classical, feature-based theory of categorization (Meyer 1997; De Geest and

Van Gorp 1999; G. Steen 1999b). From the perspective of literary criticism, the category ‘literature’ has been so

enlarged in the postmodern period as to include whatever a particular reader chooses to consider ‘text’, whether oral

or written or even the nonlinguistic ‘signifiers’ of culture. Under these circumstances, Steen wisely calls for an

empirical research program to develop a taxonomy of discourse, in which literature may be positioned within the

domain of discourse in general. He argues for a taxonomy in which “a prototypical approach emphasizes the

hierarchical order of fuzzy concepts in a domain, using the same attributes for every level of conceptualization”

(1999b:116). The seven attributes he identifies are content, form, type, function, medium, domain, and language.

What becomes clear from his discussion is that the more abstract the level, the more certain attributes are

unspecified. Thus, the basic level ‘novel’ may be characterized by values of all seven attributes, whereas the

superordinate term, ‘literature’, is characterized by domain (“artistic”), content (“fictional”), and function

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(“positively affective”), but not by the other four. The advantage of Steen’s taxonomy is that it quickly identifies

when theories of literature mix values belonging to different attributes, as Meyer (1997) does. In his analysis, the

addition of the attributes of medium, language, and form to the term ‘literature’ makes it less superordinate as a

category and closer to the level of genre. In Meyer’s prototypical definition of literature, works that contain more

features would be considered more literary or better examples of the category than those that contain less.

In their focus on the basic level of literary genre, De Geest and Van Gorp (1999) reveal the complexities of

applying a prototype approach. They point out that identifying the ‘best’ or more typical example of a literary

category is not at all the same as an aesthetic evaluation: “the ‘best’ texts are almost by definition exceptional cases

which clearly are, at least in some aspects, atypical” (1999: 43). As the discussion of Steen’s taxonomy has noted,

the greater the superordination of the category, the harder it is to establish prototypical instances; consider, for

example, the difference between ‘poem’ and ‘sonnet’. However, even the lower-level category is more problematic

than it seems. Although the sonnet exists at a more subordinate level than the poem and thus might be more readily

defined in prototypical terms, De Geest and Van Gorp show that it is just as problematic; it would be strange, if not

absurd, to consider a Petrarchan sonnet more prototypical than a Spenserian one, or a Spenserian than a

Shakespearian. And then, what does one do with poems that literary critics identify as sonnets that violate even these

parameters, with respect to rhyme, meter, structure, or number of lines? Like Steen and Meyer, De Geest and Van

Gorp indicate that literary texts and genres must be considered along their evaluative and axiological components,

considering norms, values, and models, as well as the author’s intentions and the reader’s expectations. They

suggest that the concept of norm has to include not just what is proscribed but what is permitted. One possibility for

achieving a prototypical theory of literature would be to adopt their recognition that “the so-called ‘prototype’ need

not exist in reality, since it is generally assumed to be a kind of hypothetical cognitive construction, a theoretical

‘fiction’,” much like Lakoff’s Idealized Cognitive Model that structures a conceptual domain (1999: 41). The

‘prototype’ of a literary work would then include in its description an atypical example of its genre.

This rather radical proposal—that the category of literary works needs to accommodate atypicality as

prototypical—appears to undermine the very notion of prototypicality theory, so that literary critics might well

question the relevance of applying it to literature in the first place. This is one example of the conflict between the

stove and the tower. Understanding the nature of literature involves explaining its role in the workings of the

embodied human mind. It might be argued that this begs the question. Why should the methodology applied to

understanding literature (and the other arts) be necessarily a scientific one? Leonard Talmy’s (2000: 479-80)

discussion of the parameter of protoypicality in the context of evaluation provides one answer: it is only by judging

with respect to cultural norms that one can determine the relative status of a literary work as conforming to, or

challenging them. As Talmy notes, “Thus, it appears that certain long periods in Chinese art and literature

maintained themselves with great conservatism, while this century in the West has rewarded authorial

experimentation” (480). In this light, the expectation that a literary work be atypical may be seen as the prototypical

attitude to literature held by contemporary Western critics. Only by looking at literature using the same methodology

that is applied to looking at other activities of the human mind can we fully comprehend the nature of the

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distinctions between creative and conventional expressions and trace the changes in their prototypical status through

time.

All the research surveyed in this chapter may be understood as examples of this principle. A case in point is

Ravid and Hanauer’s (1998) study of how adult speakers of Hebrew show evidence of having a prototypical theory

of rhyme. Their scientific analysis and empirical research confirms literary intuitions about the way readers respond

to the kind of rhyme schemes that occur in a variety of poetic texts. One finding that ran counter to Ravid and

Hanauer’s predictions—that Hebrew speakers tolerated contrasting coda consonants but not contrasting vowels in

the post-stress syllable of modernistic rhymes—may possibly signify a dynamic shift of category boundary in

process as Hebrew speakers grow more familiar with the rhyming practices of modernist poets. Whether Hebrew

speakers in the future tolerate both post-stress consonants and vowels as members of the same rhyme category

would be a hypothesis for such dynamic change and subject to further empirical research.

A dynamic theory of prototypicality over time could explain how literary decisions as to what constitutes a

literary text are made. For example, though Wordsworth, in his second preface to the Lyrical Ballads, remarked that

readers might question whether the poems included could be considered poetry at all, literary critics today perceive

them to be classic examples of the genre of Romantic Poetry, a possible indication of category change over time.

Evidence for a dynamic as opposed to static construal of prototypes is provided by two studies of prototypicality that

involve literary texts. Głaz’s (2002) lexicological study of the concept domain of EARTH looks at the use of the term

in six novels by Kingsley Amis, alongside data collected from the 1995 editions of The Times and The Sunday

Times. Głaz combines Fuchs’s (1994) dynamic model of semantic space with Langacker’s (1987, 1991) network

model to show how the use of a term opens a window onto its entire lexical network, with meaning construed by

shifts in both intracategorial and extracategorial tensions set up by the context. Gibbs (2003: 38) recognizes that

“prototypes are not abstract, pre-existing conceptual structures, but are better understood as products of meaning

construal.” These include interpreting context-sensitive meaning in literary texts, the judgment of novelty by skilled

readers, and the fact that an “embodied view of meaning construal nicely captures at least some of what people see

as poetic during their reading experiences” (39). Applying a dynamic view of prototype theory might well serve as a

research agenda for understanding how prototypical judgments of literature change over time.

3. CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE IN HUMAN COGNITION AND NARRATIVE

The aims of the tower are different from those of the stove. Literary critics focus on the emotional and aesthetic

effects of literary works, cognitive linguists on accounting for the way language characterizes meaning. From a

cognitive perspective, literary critics are engaged in mapping the meanings of texts from various contextual

domains. They are interested in the results of these mappings, not the means by which they accomplish them.

Analyses of these means, however, can reveal the principles on which the mappings are made. Exploring general

cognitive constraints on mapping provides a framework for evaluating the effect of individual writers who violate

these constraints. Research into the cognitive systems and constraints on human language processing provides a

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mechanism for precise description of the motivations for both literary production and reception. Leonard Talmy’s

(2000: 479-80) work reveals the extent to which the approaches of the stove and the tower may be made compatible.

Talmy’s discussion in the final chapter of his two-volume work on Cognitive Semantics is the most

comprehensive account to date of the cognitive system that gives rise to literature. Although he uses the term

‘narrative structure’ to describe this system, he does not mean narrative in its narrow sense but in the sense of its

function “to connect and integrate certain components of conscious content over time into a coherent ideational

structure” (2000: 419). In this respect, his approach correlates closely with Turner’s cognitive reversal in exploring

the structures of ‘the literary mind’ that distinguish us as human beings.

Talmy’s description of the framework of the narrative cognitive system includes three parts: domains, strata,

and parameters. Domains include “the spatiotemporal physical world with all its (so-conceived) characteristics and

properties; the culture or society with its presuppositions, conceptual and affective structuring, values, norms, and so

on; the producer or producers of a narrative; the experiencer or experiencers of a narrative; and the narrative itself”

(Talmy 2000: 422). Strata refer to the basic structuring systems (temporal, spatial, causal, and psychological) that

operate within and across domains. Parameters are the general organizing principles that apply across all the strata,

such as relating structures to each other, relative quantity (scope, granularity, density), degree of differentiation,

combinatory structure, and evaluation. Explorations of literary works tend to focus on one or more aspects within or

across these three areas. With its many examples drawn from literary works, Talmy’s system serves both as an

exemplary model for the taxonomy of discourse Steen calls for and as a way of integrating and uniting into a

coherent theory the various theoretical stances of literary criticism.

Although its theoretical framework ties together work on other literary approaches such as text and possible

world theories, reader response, psychoanalytic approaches, and so on, the fairly recent appearance of Talmy’s work

means that it has not yet had a direct effect on cognitive approaches to literature. However, several studies discussed

in this section fall under the framework of Talmy’s theory as it applies to perspective and construal by author or

reader and mental space projection and deixis.

3.1 Perspective and Construal

There is already copious research on narratology that focuses on the processes of scene construal and perspective

from the point of view of author and reader (for a useful overview, see Van Peer and Chatman 2001). For instance,

the concept of ‘implied’ author comes from literary criticism’s awareness of the dangers of assigning ‘intentionality’

to real writers of texts. New Criticism attacked intentionality, in its early phase, because it suggested that the author

of a text had a specific intention in mind, which could be accessed by a ‘true’ reading of the text. Poststructuralist

critics, in challenging the stability of the text itself, also sought to undermine the idea of intentionality in the writer.

However, following new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience, literary critics are beginning to reappraise the

roles of writer, reader, and text. With the rise of Cognitive Linguistics came the idea that conceptual metaphorical

structure could provide insights into the human mind, so that a natural move is to explore what these structures

might reveal about the author’s conceptual attitudes and motivations (Holland 1988; Crane 2000).

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Kardela and Kardela (2002) discuss the conflicting metaphorical realities of the ‘implied author’ and those of

the ‘unreliable’ narrator by exploring the extended metaphor that structures the narrative of Ishiguro’s novel The

Remains of the Day. In objecting to one literary critic’s reading of the novel as having only one narrative

perspective, the authors show the need to invoke an implied author to establish the extended conflict metaphor,

thereby accounting in a principled way for the degree of unreliability evidenced by the narrator. In a similar manner,

Kedra-Kardela and Kardela (2000) extend the literary meaning of ‘subjectivity’ as representing a character’s

thoughts and feelings to embrace the notion of the focalizer/narrator’s viewpoint, which includes world knowledge,

beliefs, and values. By adopting Langacker’s methodology of subjective and objective grounding of perspective in

scene construal, they are able to show in three stories by Elizabeth Bowen how shifts in scene construal reveal the

extent of alienation and reconciliation the protagonists experience with respect to their homes, family, and society.

Reader response theories have focused on the way readers construct meaning from text. Cognitive

psychologists have begun to explore constraints on reader responses to literary texts, as indicated by Gibbs and

Bogdonovich’s (1999) empirical studies on the role of mental imagery in interpreting image metaphors in literature.

Their findings indicate that readers of Andre Breton’s poem “Free Union” more frequently respond to image

metaphors like My wife whose hair is brush fire by mapping concrete images than by mapping their more complex

knowledge about the source domain. They conclude: “People indeed must create concrete imagistic mappings to

understand novel image metaphors” (1999: 43). These findings are particularly suggestive when considering exactly

what interpretive strategies literary critics use. Interpretations often depend on the critic’s choice of image mappings

across metaphorical domains (M. Freeman 2000, 2002a). Gibbs and Bogdonovich’s study is important in showing

that “theories of metaphor must distinguish between different kinds of conceptual mappings in explaining the

aesthetic qualities of metaphorical statements” (1999: 43).

Compatible with this approach is extensive work by Miall (1989) and Miall and Kuiken (2001) on the way

readers comprehend and evaluate literary narratives through their subjective experience of emotions and feelings.

This ‘affect’, they argue, is: (i) self-referential, in enabling readers to identify with a story; (ii) cross-domain, in

being able to transfer schemata from one domain (such as setting) to another (such as relation between characters);

and (iii) anticipatory, in providing readers with the capability of comprehending the narrative’s progress.

3.2. Mental Space Projection and Deixis

Some literary studies have used mental space theory to explore creative aspects of literary technique. Harding (2001)

discusses Hemingway’s use in one short story of counterfactual spaces in the discourse of two protagonists to

reinforce the negative affect governing their situation. Irandoust (1999) cites passages from French literary works to

show that tense markers like the past perfect construction can create narrative perspective through concealed parallel

spaces or ‘reference frames’ that enrich linear narrative sequencing with subjective information. Mental space theory

and deictic projection can account for a poet’s idiosyncratic grammar (M. Freeman 1997). Epistolary letters provide

clear examples of deictic projection since the letter writer will often project into the imagined reality space of the

letter recipient. Readers of the epistolary sections of A. S. Byatt’s novel Persuasion, are drawn into these projections

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as their own cognitive abilities trace the deictic triggers that move them from one mental space to another (Herman

1999).

These approaches seem to be one area where further cognitive linguistic research can inform literary

criticism.

4. METAPHOR AND BLENDING IN LITERARY TEXTS

Metaphor, metonymy, and the figurative tropes of classical rhetoric have always been identified as an integral part

of literary texts. The explosion of metaphor studies at the end of the last century has led to fresh ways of conceiving

the tropes and to the emergence of coherent views of metaphor and metonymy that are still very much under

development. This development is reflected in Kittay’s (1987) seminal work on metaphor which is situated in the

context of the traditionally understood divide between semantics and pragmatics while at the same time it develops a

theory of metaphor closely allied to modern cognitive science. Her theory of ‘semantic field’ spells out the way a

‘content domain’ (analogous to ‘conceptual domain’ or ‘Idealized Cognitive Model’) is linguistically articulated and

forms the basis of her understanding of metaphor structure, especially as it is represented in literary texts. She shows

that John Donne’s poem “The Bait” has a more complex metaphorical structure than Wordsworth’s poem “On the

Extinction of the Venetian Republic,” and that metaphor in Shelley’s poem “Song to the Men of England” is less

successful. Kittay’s application of semantic field theory to metaphor anticipates Fauconnier and Turner’s (2002)

theory of the structure of multiple domain mappings and also provides suggestive criteria both for determining the

distinctions between standard and novel metaphors and for evaluating the relative success of a particular literary

metaphor.

Kittay’s suggestion that metaphors may be evaluated according to the extent to which the vehicle field

restructures the topic field may provide a useful heuristic for the evaluation of literary texts. Recognizing the

existence of literary metaphor is a case in point. Cognitive metaphor analyses have revealed the absurdity of the

position of some critics that the works of Tolstoy and Jane Austen are nonmetaphorical by revealing just how

successful Tolstoy (Danaher 2003a, 2003b) and Austen (Peña Cervel 1997–1998; Wye 1998) are in tapping the

underlying metaphorical systems of all cognitive thought. Fernandes’ (2002) PhD dissertation focuses on metaphors

and cultural models which are central to the work of four contemporary Francophone women novelists Condé,

Djebar, Beyala, and Belghoul). Such work extends the concept of metaphor from its use in individual examples to

entire conceptual domains.

4.1. The Structure of Extended Metaphor and Its Literary Effects

Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1998) identified the structural schemas and extended metaphors that underlie some of the

most basic ways we conceptualize our experiences of life. These extended metaphors, as Werth (1994: 80) has

noted, can consist of “an entire metaphorical ‘undercurrent’ running through a whole text, which may manifest itself

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in a large number and variety of ‘single’ metaphors.” This metaphorical undercurrent brings structural unity to a

literary text and contributes to the emergence of a text’s theme, as Popova (2002) shows in her study of the

metaphorical mappings of smell in Süskind’s novel Perfume. In his studies on conceptual metaphors in

Shakespeare’s plays, D. Freeman (1993, 1998, 1999) explores the extended metaphors that build the theme of each

play on the principle that a theory of metaphor depends upon a theory of mind. His cognitive analyses show how

figurative patterns generalize to other patterns, such as plot and scene, and provide interpretations detailed and

coherent enough to be compared against competing interpretations.

Studying such structuring metaphors provides a principled way to explain how writers are influenced by the

metaphors of their culture while at the same time they are selecting and refining those metaphors to shape their own

thinking and attitudes about the world around them. While literary metaphors often subvert conventional and

stereotypical cultural attitudes (see M. Freeman 1995), Kövecses (1994: 132) concludes that what Tocqueville saw

in his travels through America “must have been thoroughly influenced by the unoriginal, ready-made, and

subconscious ideas” that constitute the basis of the PERSON metaphors he uses to describe American democracy.

That writers adopt certain metaphors from a range of metaphor systems deeply embedded in their culture is explored

further in Csábi’s (2000, 2001) articles on Thomas Paine’s arguments for the separation of America from Britain

and the immigration experiences of American Puritans.

Like Kövecses and Csábi, Bertuol (2001: 21) is interested in the “influence that common knowledge and

beliefs shared by the members of a linguistic community exert on the poet’s choice of metaphors.” However,

Bertuol is not claiming that this influence determines a poet’s choices; if this were true, then it would be difficult if

not impossible to explain individual, creative, and revolutionary thinking. His study of the works of Margaret

Cavendish, a seventeenth-century poet writing on scientific matters, shows how mathematical knowledge at that

time influenced people’s views of reality. The cultural choice the poet makes of the seventeenth-century conceptual

metaphor UNIVERSE IS MATHEMATICS enables her to argue that “irrationalia, such as female nature and fancy,

cannot be penetrated and controlled” (Bertuol 2001: 37).

Exploring the relations of a writer’s metaphorical perspective to his or her culture also provides a means for

explaining the extent of a writer’s popularity. Kimmel (2001) analyzes the metaphor of CENTER AND ALTERITY in

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to see whether it sheds light on “the scope of variation” and “prevailing cultural

dispositions” of Victorian England. He concludes that Conrad’s use of the metaphor reflects the Victorian

psychopolitical mindset of a self-model that Europeans have been subconsciously sharing for a long time and

explains why Conrad’s novel reverberated so strongly with its Victorian audience.

4.2 Creative and Conventional Metaphors

Turner’s reversal in claiming the literary mind generated language removes the problem of attempting to discover

how conventional language could give rise to creative language. In the case of metaphor, deeply entrenched or

conventionalized metaphors presumably began as novel or creative metaphor. However, old habits die hard, and the

language, if not the spirit, of much metaphorical work in Cognitive Linguistics tends to reflect a conventional to

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creative direction, as reflected in two of Lakoff and Turner’s (1989) frequently quoted passages: “Poetic thought

uses the mechanisms of everyday thought, but it extends them, elaborates them, and combines them in ways that go

beyond the ordinary” (67); “Poetic language uses the same conceptual and linguistic apparatus as ordinary

language” (158). Though these statements might appear reductionist, all Lakoff and Turner are saying is that the

underlying apparatus or mechanisms of poetic and conventional language and thought are the same, not that the two

are conflated. Several studies have explored the extent to which creative metaphors arise from extension,

elaboration, and combination in such writers as Henry James (Čulić 2001), Eavan Boland and Adrienne Rich

(McGrath n.d.), and Hemingway (Strack 2000). In a detailed and thorough explanation of conceptual orientation

metaphors that combine to create such conventional expressions as down and out to mean ‘destitute and

unfortunate,’ Sweetser (2004) shows how the same co-orientations of metaphorical mappings occur in a pivotal

speech in Shakespeare’s tragedy Julius Caesar. Although she does not specifically claim that such mappings

become literary when they form a single complex model, her notion that this in fact is what occurs in Shakespeare’s

passage suggests one possible way of distinguishing creative from conventional metaphor.

The prevailing assumption in these studies is that a continuum exists between creative and conventional use

of metaphor, and that devices such as elaboration, extension, and compression account for the distinction between

them. G. Steen (1994, 2001b) challenges this assumption as presumed rather than proven and calls for cognitive

psychologists, linguists, and literary critics to work toward a better understanding of how we identify and process

metaphor. To this end, G. Steen (1999a, 2001a) has developed and tested for reliability a five-step procedure for

metaphor identification that is based on conceptual metaphor theory and blending. Several issues for cognitive

research emerge from G. Steen’s studies, including how to account for the distinction between conceptual and

linguistic metaphor and how to identify metaphorical projections when the target domain is not identified. G.

Steen’s reliability studies indicate that the technical ability to identify metaphor, especially in literary text, is

something that has to be learned, a finding that has implications for both pedagogy and metaphor theory.

4.3 Blending as a Metaphorical Structure

So far as I know, no researcher to date has considered exploring metaphor as a category, though many different

types of metaphor are discussed, such as ‘conventional’,‘creative’, ‘banal’, ‘extended’, and so on. Many of the

arguments over the structure of metaphor may in fact rest in the failure to recognize that there may be many

different metaphorical types and structures. As noted in section 4, Kittay’s work explores some of the possible

structures metaphor might have. Although Fauconnier and Turner’s work on conceptual integration networks or

‘blending’ does not specifically refer to metaphor, all metaphors at some stage in their creation involve blending, so

that the analysis of single-, double-, or multiple-scope blending might very well be productively applied to metaphor

structure. As in all cognitive linguistic applications to literature, work in this area has only just begun, but

increasingly, more researchers are applying blending analysis to literary texts.

Blending provides an elegant explanation for creativity in its theory of an ‘emergent structure’ created by the

blend. It explains, for example, the rhetorical effects in haiku texts of juxtaposing phrases by kireji (cutting letters)

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and kakekotoba (multiple puns); and it provides a better reading of the frequent use in haiku of personification and

allegory through indirect mapping across spaces and recruitment from common cultural knowledge (Hiraga 1999a,

1999b). Blending reveals the structure of prototypical and borderline allegories, from Dante to Pynchon (Sinding

2001). Blending enables F. Steen (2002) to show how an Aphra Behn novel, by mapping the rhetoric of power onto

the rhetoric for love, may have functioned as both literature and political propaganda. Oakley’s (1998) article on

conceptual blending, narrative discourse, and rhetoric provides an exemplary account of blending and how it

operates in Art Spiegelman’s Maus to link the larger story of the Holocaust with the more immediate story of

Richelieu’s relationship to his ‘ghost brother’. Matthew’s (2003) dissertation explores temporal compression blends

in literature. Coulson (2003) explores conceptual blending in political and religious rhetoric.

Conceptual schemas and blending also address questions of literary structure and style, such as reconfiguring

literary allusion, constructing a lyric subject, establishing the roots of African American poetry, and comparing

literary styles (L. Ramey 1996, 2002). Poetic styles can be identified, described, and compared according to which

image schemas are chosen as a structuring principle for a writer’s poetics (M. Freeman 2002b). Further explorations

of literary examples promise to provide specific details as to how mappings and blending create coherence and

cohesion in literary texts and to perhaps identify further principles of creative language use.

5. EMBODIMENT, ICONICITY, AND NEUROLOGY IN LITERARY FORM AND AFFECT

Literary critics in stylistics, especially those influenced by New Criticism, structuralism, and the work of the Russian

formalists, have long recognized the importance of formal, emotional, and aesthetic effects in literary works. As a

natural extension from the principle of the embodied mind and in line with literary critical work in this area

(McGann 1991), some cognitive linguists are beginning to explore literary ‘meaning’ that arises from formal

textural qualities or ‘pastiosity’ (to borrow a term from graphology), where physical, sensory modalities fuse with

linguistic and metalinguistic forms (M. Freeman 2000). As a corollary to reader response theory in literary criticism,

several cognitive studies have begun to use empirical research to determine such literary affects. These include

sensory modalities beyond sight and sound, the way language in poetic texts iconically reflects its meaning, and how

these might be governed by cognitive constraints in the brain.

5.1 Sensory Modalities of Embodiment: Empirical Research

Certain general cognitive constraints have been shown to govern figurative use. In a series of psychological

experiments, Todd and Clarke (2001) were able to show in a principled way the cognitive similarities and

differences between simile and metaphor, with simile being harder to process. In simile, synaesthesia, and zeugma,

Shen (1997) found that Hebrew poets across different schools and periods prefer mapping from the more accessible

term. They provide psychological evidence from empirical experiments to support this constraint. Whenever the two

terms in simile differ in their relative concrete and abstract levels or degree of salience, the preferred direction of

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mapping is from more to less. In zeugma (Shen 1997) and synaesthesia (Shen and Cohen 1998), poets were found to

prefer naming the more prototypical term first and to prefer mappings that went from senses more closely related to

the body, such as touch and taste, to those less closely related, such as sound and sight; readers found these easier to

understand. Gibbs and Kearney’s (1994) work on poetic oxymoron produced similar results. Shen (1997: 67)

concludes that studies such as these show “not only that poetic uses of figuration constrain our cognitive system, but

that poetic figures are themselves constrained by general cognitive constraints.”

5.2 Iconicity of Form and Meaning

Embodiment takes on a special form with respect to structural and visual iconicity. Recent research on signed

languages has given cognitive linguists crucial new insights into the relationship between form and meaning: it is

almost impossible to ignore the pervasive iconicity present in signed language structure. Taub (2001) makes the first

major advance since Charles Sanders Peirce in building a modern cognitive theory of the nature of iconicity,

applicable equally to linguistic and semiotic systems in any language. Applying her theory to American Sign

Language (ASL) poetry as well as to the structure of ASL grammar, Taub’s chapter on Ella Mae Lenz’s work

provides new insights for both literary and linguistic theorists. Wilcox (2001) centers on the issues of productivity

and creativity in the use of metaphor in ASL and analyzes the unique role of visual iconicity in the poetics of a

visual-gestural language.

Hiraga’s (1998, 2002, 2005) discussion of the metaphor-icon link in poetic texts provides a cognitive account

of how iconicity and metaphor can be fused in grammar and language. Hiraga shows how two poems by George

Herbert and Percy Bysshe Shelley differ in degree and types of iconicity. Herbert’s poem exhibits imagic iconicity

overtly, while Shelley’s poem exhibits diagrammatic iconicity covertly. Hiraga’s thesis is important because it

suggests one definition of poetic language: foregrounding metaphor-icon links makes language poetic because form

and meaning are closer together in literary than in nonliterary language in the sense of sharing and sometimes fusing

sensory features. In this sense, Berntsen’s (1999) discussion of the ‘embodied’ nature of modernist poetry may be

extended to all forms of poetic language, regardless of school or period.

5.3 Neurological Constraints and Affordances

A more general view of human cognition is taken in Danaher’s (1998) study of metonymy in Gogol, where Danaher

draws attention to the need for cognitive linguists to step beyond their conventional boundaries of showing how

cognitive systems motivate and constrain linguistic structure to explore the fundamental principles which underlie

human cognition itself. Benzon (2000) explains the ability of the neural self to animate imaginary characters in

literary fictions. Zunshine (2003) provides insight into Virginia Woolf’s style by exploring findings on autism and

cognitive experiments on our ability to imagine representations of mental states. Richardson (2001) re-examines

from a cognitive neuroscience perspective the extent to which literary Romanticism was historically deeply

implicated with research and speculation on the brain.

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Some cognitive psychologists have begun to explore aspects of literary form and affect from a conceptual

perspective. In addition to Miall’s and Kuiken’s work mentioned in section 3.1, Getz and Lubart (2000) explain

creative metaphor in terms of emotional information processing. Their Emotional Resonance Model of creative

associative thought reveals how “feeling tones” or “emotional traces, acquired through self-involving experiences,

play a key role in the production and interpretation of creative metaphors” (2000: 285). They show that whereas the

conventional metaphor X is a burdock meaning ‘X is a prickly person’ has little creative potential, Tolstoy’s feelings

about seeing a burdock one day created an emotional trace in his mind that became linked with his memories of the

Chechen leader and thus provided the potential for creative metaphor in his story Hadji Murat. Such analyses

complement literary stylistics work, such as that of Brearton and Simpson (2001) on language, form, and memory in

Michael Longley’s poetry.

6. FURTHER APPLICATIONS

This chapter has focused primarily on studies of literary texts inspired by the work of cognitive linguists as defined

in this handbook. Following is a brief survey of related research.

6.1 Multimedia Art Forms

Several researchers have begun to explore these cognitive processes in other art forms. Zbikowski (1999, 2002)

applies blending to the analysis of early nineteenth-century art songs. A text-music blend creates a much richer

structure than is provided by text or music alone. His blending analysis of different musical settings of Wilhelm

Müller’s “Trockne Blumen” shows how the music constrains our interpretation of the text to produce somewhat

different descriptions of the miller’s character and motivations. Forceville (1999) considers conceptual structural

metaphor across verbal and pictorial domains in the novel, screenplay, and film versions of Ian McEwan’s The

Comfort of Strangers. He shows how both Pinter in his screenplay and Schrader in his film employ pictorial

metaphors to support the underlying metaphor COLIN IS A CHILD, which describes the novel’s adult protagonist. An

even more integrative approach to multimedia dimensions is Narayan’s (2001) research on comic books, which

describes multiple embeddings in blended spaces where such narrative elements as focus and viewpoint are

sometimes created jointly by images and ‘voice-overs’.

Rohrer (2005) defines mimetic blending as a blend that self-referentially embeds itself into subsequent blends

and shows how this iterative chaining serves as a literary device in Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel Aunt Julia and the

Scriptwriter, and its film version Tune in Tomorrow, to provide metafictional commentary on issues such as the

ability of art to create fictive emotion. The use of grammatical voice in a dynamic discourse situation in a Tagalog

video melodrama reveals the underlying scenarios that affect whether or not the agency of the participants will be

profiled (Palmer 1998). Palmer’s study suggests that cognitive analysis may reveal how emotional discourse in

literature is governed by the social and power relationships that give rise to dramatic conflict and resolution.

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6.2 Religious Texts

Tsur’s (2003) latest contribution to his theory of Cognitive Poetics studies “how religious ideas are turned into

verbal imitations of religious experience by poetic structure” (7). Ranging widely over metaphysical, baroque, and

romantic poetry, Tsur explores all the many different aspects of human cognitive processes in a comprehensive and

detailed manner to show how poets attempt to represent the ineffable.

One of these ways is of course through metaphor, and the articles in Boeve and Feyaerts’s (2003) edition of

Metaphor and God-talk provide a cognitive linguistic perspective on religious discourse. Other book-length studies

include discussion of an extended metaphor describing the deity in the context of Hebrew cultural beliefs and

practices (Sienstra 1993), and a study of the bible through metaphor and translation (Feyaerts 2003). From another

perspective, M. Ramey (1997) reviews the religious preconceptions of biblical exegesists that govern their

interpretations of St. Paul’s views on the body and the resurrection, and suggests that a blending analysis of

particular Pauline passages in the New Testament comes closer to Paul’s eschatological and ethical stances. Van

Hecke (2001) explores polysemy or homonymy from a cognitive perspective in a Biblical Hebrew verb and root to

provide new insights into the way Hebrew functions. In 2002, a Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences

colloquium brought together scholars in Hebrew semantics, biblical studies, and Cognitive Linguistics to discuss

“The Book of Job: Suffering and Cognition in Context,” which resulted in the publication of several cognitive

articles (van Wolde 2003). Noteworthy in that volume is Geeraerts’ (2003) analysis because it not only argues for an

ironic reading of the controversial speeches of God in the Book of Job, but suggests ways humor in a text can be

characterized and described.

6.3 Humor

Humor in general has caught the attention of cognitive linguists as evidenced by the large number of proposals

submitted to the Eight International Cognitive Linguistics Conference (Veale, Feyaerts, and Brône 2004). The

cognitive structure of jokes and their reception are explored in several cognitive studies (Coulson 2000; Coulson and

Kutas 2001; Goel and Dolan 2001). Kurt Feyaerts (1997) shows how metonymic extension patterns provide a

constant renewal of the humorous expressive meanings in the conceptual domain of the German terms for stupidity.

Conceptual metaphor approaches reveal how writers create literary humor through manipulation of

conventional metaphorical schemas (Sun 1994) or by juxtaposing literal and metaphorical meaning (Jurado 1994).

Jurado, for example, shows how the Roman poet Horace exploits the orientation metaphors GOOD IS UP and BAD IS

DOWN to argue that ‘up’ is ‘good’ as long as it does not literally go too far. Donald Barthelme’s short stories are a

good example of how the interplay between the literal and the metaphorical structures humor. In “Some of Us Had

Been Threatening Our Friend Colby,” Barthelme plays with what would happen if we actually responded literally to

the notions of common metaphorical expressions like going too far and I’ll kill you for that. This interplay between

the metaphorical and the literal to create humor is further explored by Jurado and Gregoris (1995) in several

examples from the Roman dramatist Plautus.

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6.4 Dreams

Another aspect of written texts is the prolific and extensive work on dream research. With the development of new

methodologies in neuroscientific studies of the brain, several researchers have begun to explore cognitive linguistic

approaches to dream content analysis. Notable in this area is Domhoff’s (2003) study that presents a new

neurocognitive model of dreams using empirical research and including an extensive bibliography of related

research.

6.5 Literary Translation

The task of translating one language into another poses a great challenge for translators of literary texts. Here,

Cognitive Linguistics provides a special contribution. Tabakowska’s (1993) study applies Cognitive Grammar

principles to literary translation. Defining translation equivalence in terms of units larger than a single sentence,

Tabakowska notes that these units overlap with Langacker’s notions of image and scene construal. In a series of case

studies, Tabakowska shows how Cognitive Linguistics contributes to the art and practice of translation by: (i)

providing systematic explanations for the ease or difficulty of translation; (ii) describing the techniques of style

through “pairing individual dimensions of imagery with particular linguistic means” (1993: 130); and (iii)

identifying the reasons in some cases for the impossibility of translation. She concedes that “it takes a poet to

translate poetry” (133), but argues that Cognitive Linguistics can help provide better understanding of the images

and techniques in poetic text.

Wójcik-Leese (2000) also employs Langacker’s theory of scene construal to analyze the strategies of free

verse composition and to provide principled reasons for preferring one translation over another. Focusing on free

verse as a visual, rather than phonic, form, Wójcik-Leese (2000b) applies Figure/Ground orientation to the structure

of a Polish poem by Adam Zagajewski to show the importance of the formal elements of ordering and placement of

words and phrases, along with delimiting punctuation. Translators, she suggests, ignore the significance of such

formal patterning at their peril.

Understanding conceptual metaphoric networks might also help translators achieve greater equivalence in

their translations, as Holm (2001) shows in analyzing two translations into Danish of the Spanish poet Garcia Lorca.

Holm claims that Cognitive Linguistics provides a better possibility for assessing not just whether a given

translation of a metaphor can be said to provide the ‘equivalent effect’ in the target language or not, but what the

“effect” consists in and by which criteria ‘equivalence’ can be achieved.

Typological differences in languages affect narrative style with implications for literary translation. Slobin

(1996) compared the verb-framed language of Spanish with the satellite-framed language of English in verbs of

motion in ten novels. He discovered significant differences between the two languages with respect to rhetorical

style, descriptions of movement, and relative allocation of attention to movement and setting. He notes that “Spanish

speakers and writers have apparently developed a ‘rhetorical set’ that favors separate clauses for each segment of a

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complex motion event” (1996: 217). When he compared translations of the novels, he found that Spanish translators

faced greater problems than their English counterparts did. In a subsequent paper, Slobin (1997) enlarged his study

to include other satellite-framed (Germanic and Slavic) languages as opposed to verb-framed (Romance, Semitic,

Turkic, and Japanese) languages, with similar results. He is careful to note, however, that cultural factors can modify

the sharp distinctions of linguistic typology that he found in his studies. These studies serve as a model for Cognitive

Linguistics approaches to literary translations.

7. THE POETIC CHALLENGE

Like cognitive linguistic approaches, Cognitive Poetics attempts to describe how poetic language and form is

constrained and shaped by human cognitive processes. Tsur’s theory of Cognitive Poetics is more inclusive of the

cognitive sciences in general than studies in Cognitive Poetics that draw from linguistics and stylistics (Stockwell

2002; Gavins and Steen 2003) and therefore provides one way of evaluating the directions such studies should take.

Cureton, (1992, 1997, 2000, 2001) and Tsur (1992, 1998) both challenge Cognitive Linguistics’ failure to

attend to the formal aspects of literary works, such as the temporal dimension of meter and rhythm. Although

differing in their theories of rhythm, both believe that rhythm is a general cognitive process and make significant

claims about the formal and prosodic features of poetry that need to be explored in order to fully account for the role

of rhythm in human cognition and language.

Conspicuous by its absence in this chapter is the role of phonology and phonetics in poetic discourse. In its

infancy, Cognitive Phonology has not yet reached the stage of providing theoretical and methodological applications

to literature. However, since literary iconicity often depends on sound patterning, as Alexander Pope showed more

than two hundred years ago in his Essay on Criticism, cognitive studies of phonetic iconicity in poetic texts could

contribute much to a cognitive theory of phonology.

Brain studies of connections between the emotive qualities of the senses and their aesthetic effects indicate

additional potential areas for exploration of the affective dimension of poetic language. In his appraisal of what it

would take to have a “cognitive science of poetics,” Hogan (2003b) takes us back to a Sanskrit theory of poetry

based on aesthetic response being the result of experiencing rasa (usually translated, according to Hogan, as

‘sentiment’ but akin to emotion, with no precise English language equivalent): “These rasas are evoked in a reader

by words, sentences, topics, and so on, presented in a literary work. This is, of course, in part the result of literal

meanings. But it is also, and crucially, a function of the clouds of nondenumerable, nonsubstitutable,

nonpropositional suggestions that surround these texts” (2003b: 51).

The poetic challenge we face is to also consider these formal and affective aspects—Langer’s (1953, 1967)

“form” and “feeling”—into an adequate, productive, and plausible theory of aesthetic creation and response. Until

we do, we will not be able to claim we have fully accounted for human cognition in language.

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8. CONCLUSION

Can stove and tower people communicate productively with each other, or are their approaches, as Burrows (2003),

suggests, “at root divergent”? A symposium held at the Getty Museum in Spring 2002 brought together cognitive

scientists and art historians to discuss “Frames of Viewing: The Brain, Cognition, and Art.” Stimulating and

insightful as these discussions were, proceedings were marred by the contempt shown by some art historians for

what they saw as the crude naivety of the cognitive scientists in their approach to the arts. Certainly, the expertise in

sophisticated analyses evidenced by art historians, musicologists, and literary critics should not be ignored. As the

research discussed in this chapter reveals, researchers have been quick to see the advantages of applying cognitive

linguistic research to the literary arts; unfortunately, there is no indication that the reverse is true. So far as I have

been able to determine, with the exception of discussions of cognitive poetics and stylistics (Semino and Culpeper

2002), there have been no critical exchanges with existing literary theory, nor any indication that the Cognitive

Linguistics approach is recognized within the field. This may change with results from the conference at the

University of Helsinki in 2004 on “Cognition and Literary Interpretation in Practice.” It remains to be seen whether

the special issue being prepared for the Publications of the Modern Language Association on new directions in

Poetics will include any mention of Cognitive Poetics.

Despite this disheartening comment, the work reviewed in this chapter strikes a more positive note.

Researchers are already showing that Cognitive Linguistics can contribute to literary theory by providing insight

into such matters as the changing status of literary appreciation through time, the evaluation of quality in both

literary texts and criticism, and the empirical testing of literary choices and judgments. More broadly, the emerging

field of Cognitive Poetics, which includes these approaches, has already shown that the literary mind is indeed

fundamental to the processes of human cognition.

NOTES

I am grateful to all those who sent me information about their cognitive work in literary studies, without which I

would not have been able to write this chapter. I also thank Eve Sweetser for her contributions, especially regarding

ASL work, the editors of this volume, and Beth and Don Freeman for helpful suggestions on earlier drafts. Needless

to say, all errors of commission and omission are mine.

1. A growing body of literature reflects the current interest of cognitive linguists and literary scholars in the

ways Cognitive Linguistics can illumine literary texts and the challenges and opportunities literary texts raise for

Cognitive Linguistics. Special issues of the Journal of Pragmatics (1995) and Poetics Today (1999) have focused on

cognitive approaches to metaphor in literary texts; other special issues on cognitive approaches include Journal of

English Linguistics (2002), Style (2002), Poetics Today (2003) and Language and Literature (2005, 2006); articles

now regularly appear in such journals as Language and Literature, Literary Semantics, Metaphor and Symbol,

Mosaic, Style, and the Journal of English Linguistics. In addition to the citations mentioned in this chapter, there are

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books by Turner (1987), Spolsky (1993), Bex (2000), Semino and Culpeper (2002). Hogan (2003a), Popova,

Freeman, and Freeman (forthcoming), Brône and Vandaele (forthcoming); and three textbooks: Stockwell (2002),

Gavins and Steen (2003), and Kövecses (2002). Associations that have sponsored special sessions and disciplinary

areas featuring cognitive approaches to literary texts include the Poetics and Linguistic Association (PALA), the

Modern Language Association (MLA), the International Cognitive Linguistics Association (ICLA), the European

Society for the Study of English (ESSE), the International Association of Literary Semantics (IALS), the

International Association of Empirical Aesthetics (IAEA), the Western Humanities Alliance (WHA), and the

University of North Texas annual Languaging conference. Several websites include information on cognitive

approaches to literary texts, such as the home page of the coglit discussion group http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~,

blending at http://www.wam.umd.edu/~mturn/WWW/blending.html, metaphor at http://www.let.vu.nl/pragglejaz,

and literature, cognition, and the brain at http://cogweb.english.ucsb.edu/Culture/WoF/eventsrtc.html, iconicity at

http://home.hum.uva.nl/iconicity/, and the Cognitive Poetics Project at http://www.tau.ac.il/~tsurxx/index.html.

Further links are available at these websites for additional related research.

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From conceptual to literary metaphors: A neuroaesthetics perspective

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Jun 2024

M. Dolores Porto

It is generally agreed that literary metaphors are produced and interpreted by using the same strategies as more conventional, ordinary metaphorical expressions (George Lakoff & Mark Turner 1989; Zoltán Kövecses 2010 ). However, the aesthetic experience of reading metaphors in literature is a complex phenomenon that remains only partially explained. This paper aims at contributing to the study of the cognitive mechanisms that allow the aesthetic experience when reading poetic metaphors. For this purpose, after a short review of previous research on literary metaphors in the Cognitive Linguistic framework, the main tenets of Neuroaesthetics ( Semir Zeki 2001 ; Vilayanur Ramachandran 2003 ), an emerging empirical discipline, are presented as referred to the study of visual art. Then, the insights from both fields are compared and applied to the study of metaphors. Results show significant coincidences as empirical research in neuroscience seem to confirm the theories and hypotheses posed by cognitive linguists, as for the way in which the emotional response to poetic metaphors is elicited.

The Neoliberal Mind Style in the Postcolonial Novel: The Case of Ngozie's Americanah and Unigwe's On Black Sisters' Street ‫لنقوزي‬ ‫أمريكانا‬ ‫حالة‬ ‫االستعامر:‬ ‫بعد‬ ‫ما‬ ‫اية‬ ‫رو‬ ‫يف‬ ‫ايل‬ ‫النيوليرب‬ ‫العقل‬ ‫أسلوب‬ ‫ليونيغوي‬ ‫سرتيت‬ ‫سيسرتز‬ ‫بالك‬ ‫وأون

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Jun 2022

This paper aims to examine mind style in two postcolonial novels, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s Americanah and Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street. We will demonstrate how neoliberal ideology is conveyed linguistically by means of characters’ mind styles. In doing this, we argue that it is productive to link Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Critical Discourse Analysis, and postcolonial theory to arrive at a comprehensive image to the way the author attributes neoliberal aspects to his characters for the purpose of highlighting the danger of this ideology in postcolonial societies. Throughout the analysis, we will explain the significance of the authors’ linguistic choices that are attributed to novel’s characters and their importance in the thematic development of postcolonial novel. Specifically, we will adopt the main principles of Conceptual Metaphor Theory to dig out the conceptual processes that set the mind style that adopts a neoliberal ideology backing them up with Critical Discourse Analysis.

Metaphorical Insights into Human Psychology in Jane Eyre

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Apr 2024

The article deals with the analyses of the metaphors that characterize the psychological state of a person. The main attention is paid to the structures reflecting the spiritual experiences of the main characters of the work - Jane Eyre, Rochester and Lord Soules. It is known that each of the mentioned characters has its own characteristics, and this, by the way, occupies a leading place in the structure of the ideological theme of the novel.

On Ronald Langacker’s Semanticocentrism

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Nov 2024

Gustavo Augusto Fonseca Silva

Ray Jackendoff understands that Noam Chomsky’s linguistic models distort the nature of language due to its ‘syntactocentrism.’ Coined by Jackendoff, this term means Chomsky’s assumption that the syntactic component of language is central while the phonological and semantic components are merely interpretive. Jackendoff also states that since the 1970s many researchers have made a mistake opposite to Chomsky’s, by denying that syntax has a relevant role in grammar. Considering such a scenario, this paper analyzes Ronald Langacker’s cognitive grammar, in which syntax is replaced by semantics as the central linguistic component. The goal is to show how Langacker misrepresented language structure by doing so.

Imagic iconicity as thematic representation in selected Nigerian children’s poetry

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Feb 2024
Semiotica

Sounds play crucial roles in a poem’s meaning (re)construction. Grasping the content of a literary work such as poetry often requires a profound interpretation of the underlying linguistic cum phonetic codes of its discourse. Extant studies on Nigerian children’s poetry have paid little attention to this aspect of meaning conception, thereby concentrating mainly on the surface lexical constructs. Hence, this study aims to examine imagic iconicity in children’s poems in order to demonstrate how a poem’s thematic realization is inferred through the interpretation of the phonic and acoustic nature of the sounds employed. The study involves five poems: three from Ossie Enekwe’s Gentle Birds Come to me and two from Ikeogu Oke’s Song of Success and Other Poems for Children . The analysis is anchored to insights from Charles Sanders Peirce’s concept of the iconic sign, and exploits the action of acoustic and phonetic articulation of sounds to determine their functions and effects in the poems. The study reveals how specialized lexemic choices and onomatopoeia (kinaesthemes, phonaestheme or sound symbolism) in children’s poems make each poem functional and purposeful. Thus, children’s poetry contains language structures and configurations that transmit sense and embody what the poem is asserting in a way that interestingly engages the reader.

Self and Mind Style in the Postcolonial Novel: The Case of Ngozie's Americanah and Unigwe's On Black Sisters' Street

Thesis

Full-text available

Oct 2023

Aicha Imane Bessadat

In the arena of postcolonial literature, narratives carry immense significance in portraying the complex experiences of individuals within the context of postcolonialism. Works such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah and Chika Unigwe's On Black Sisters' Street make valuable contributions to this genre, as they delve into the postcolonial subject's struggles with identity, migration, and cultural shifts. However, traditional literary analyses often fail to fully capture the intricate connection between language, cognition, and the portrayal of postcolonial themes. In particular, there is a need to decipher how characters' 'self' concepts and mind style, intricately intertwined with linguistic choices, contribute to a nuanced understanding of their identities and the broader postcolonial contexts depicted in Americanah and On Black Sisters‟ Street. The main focus of this study is to use cognitive stylistic analysis in order to delve into and illuminate the complex relationship between 'self' concepts, mind style, and how postcolonial themes are portrayed in Americanah and On Black Sisters' Street. The ultimate goal is to gain a deeper understanding of the identities of the characters, narrators, and authors, as well as their postcolonial backgrounds within the narratives. Furthermore, this study aims to assess the capability of cognitive stylistic analysis in delineating the multi-faceted dimensions of identity, specifically the conceptualizations of 'self' and the neoliberal mind style as depicted in Americanah and On Black Sisters' Street. A descriptive analytical approach is employed in this investigation. This study delves into the concept of "self" in postcolonial novels, utilizing well-established theories from cognitive stylistics such as Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Schema Theory. Then, it closely examines the author's depiction of the neoliberal mind style, drawing on the same principles as well as incorporating lexico-semantic vii analysis and critical discursive analysis. Through the analysis, it becomes apparent that there is a connection between language structures and the development of themes found in both Americanah and On Black Sisters' Street meaning that the postcoloniality of the texts serve as context that fosters the rise of specific linguistic manifestations. This offers valuable insights into how cognitive stylistics can shed light on the multifaceted nature of postcolonial identity. In the first part of the study, the prevalent use of metaphors related to the self, as well as the force and container schemas, is revealed to be intricately linked to traumatic events, the fragmentation of identity, and the experience of diaspora. This reveals the profound impact of postcolonial experiences on the characters' sense of self and identity. The following phase delves into the relationship between the narrative voice, which is anti-neoliberal, and the individual characters' unique mental frameworks. Here, the study uncovers how the narrative's structure reinforces the cognitive and emotional journeys of the characters. Furthermore, this narrative engages readers while influencing their information processing, ultimately shaping their perspectives on neoliberal ideology within a postcolonial context.

A Cognitive-Stylistic Study of Deixis and Deictic Shifting in Iris Murdoch's The Bell

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2024

In cognitive stylistics, "deixis" is deemed one of the core linguistic elements through which both the physical and ideological secnats of the participants in fictional narratives, namely the narrator and the character(-focalizer)s, are demonstrated. This study aims at investigating the cognitive functions of the different kinds of deixis, i.e., perceptual, spatial, temporal, social, textual, and compositional deixis, in The Bell (1958), a critically acclaimed novel by the British philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch. Because of its special narrative discourse, in particular the use of variable internal focalization, Murdoch's novel proves to be a proper case for exploring how deixis impacts upon the (implied) reader's cognition of the story. Thus, utilizing a descriptive-analytic method, the present research examines the text worlds and mind styles shaped in this novel through various kinds of deixis, among other textual elements, and explores the relationship between these text worlds and the way they inform the reading process. To achieve this goal, this qualitative study draws upon the cognitive deixis theory to examine selected extracts from Dora Greenfield's and Toby Gashe's discourses in this novel, as two of the major character-focalizers. The findings suggest that deictic expressions serve a significant function in appreciating the characterization of the fictional personages, their relations, and consequently the narrative's overall theme, thereby affecting and somehow directing the reading process. This mainly occurs through the reader's cognitive pushes and pops in and out of the different layers of the narrative discourse as well as projecting the narrator's and character-focalizers' text worlds or deictic fields and constantly shifting among them. By foregrounding the role of deixis in narration, this study carries significant implications for cognitive stylistics of prose fictional narratives, providing a deeper appreciation of the relationships between characters and between characters and fictional settings in such texts.

Reading Richard III and the Tower of London

Book

Jul 2024

Kristen Deiter

Educational Leadership Research: Methodological Trends (2016-2019)

Chapter

Full-text available

May 2024

The purpose of the review is to explore the main methodological approaches used to research leadership in the field of education. This article offers a small-scale systematic review spanning three years of empirical research (from 2016 to 2019) on educational leadership. Practice within the field focused on stories told by former educational leaders, and their prescriptions for practice were based on their ideological beliefs and personal experiences in life. To identify suitable empirical research studies a bounded search was carried out into specific bibliographic databases such as, “Educational Resources Information Centre” (ERIC), and “The British Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Society” (BELMAS). In total, 23 empirical studies on educational leadership were sampled from 11 peer-reviewed journals. The findings suggest that from 2016 onward mixed methods and case study research designs have become increasingly important in the field of educational leadership. Interviews, observations, focus groups and document analysis have been the most common data collection methods in qualitative studies, while surveys and close-ended questionnaires have been dominant methods to collect quantitative data in this area. The average number of participants involved in the qualitative studies was 30, and 400 was a good sample size for quantitative studies. The most widely used methods for analyzing qualitative data were grounded theory, thematic analysis, and content analysis. The primary methods for analyzing quantitative data were factor analysis and descriptive statistics analysis. This systematic review represents diverse and rich resources for current and future scholarship. Studying these resources provides a better appreciation of how methodological approaches have been developed in the field of educational leadership and management over time.

LINGUO-COGNITIVE ANALYSIS OF A LITERARY TEXT: LINGUISTIC MEANS OF EXPRESSION OF CONCEPTS AND IMAGES

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2023

The work is devoted to the study of the linguo-cognitive analysis of the literary text in the aspect of linguistic means of expressing concepts and images. The relevance of this article is due to the growing attention to the analysis of the literary text using the methods and techniques of cognitive linguistics. The main aspects of cognitive linguistics, lingua-cognitive analysis, and text as an object of cognitive linguistics research are widely covered in the work. The main features of the literary text, its components, and lingua-cognitive analysis of linguistic means of expressing concepts and images are defined. The purpose of the research is to reveal the lingo-cognitive analysis of the literary text in the aspect of linguistic means of expressing concepts and images. The object of research is a literary text as material for lingua-cognitive research. Research methods. Such research methods such as description, analysis and synthesis, comparison, generalization, cognitive analysis, linguistic analysis, and modelling were used in the work. The article reveals the lingua-cognitive analysis of the literary text in terms of linguistic means of expressing concepts and images. The essence of the concept of “cognitive linguistics” and the main aspects of this phenomenon are characterized. The interpretation of the term “lingua-cognitive analysis” is defined. The essence of the “text” concept and the classification features of the text are described. The scientific work describes the features of the literary text. The components of the literary text influencing the lingua-cognitive analysis are characterized. Such elements of the literary text as image, concept, character, and evaluation are summarized.

Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse--Index

Book

Full-text available

Mar 1992

Richard Cureton

Linguistics, Stylistics, and Poetics

Article

Full-text available

Dec 1997

Richard Cureton

This essay is an early explanation of my temporal poetics, with an extended application to Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."

THE DYNAMICS OF MEANING Explorations in the Conceptual Domain of EARTH

Book

Full-text available

Jan 2002

Adam Głaz

from the Introduction: The great number and diversity of linguistic models of lexical semantics is the result of disagreements on how to explicate the meanings of words, how to describe the relationships between them and, indeed, disagreements as to what constitutes a word. The present work is meant to be a contribution to this discussion in that it proposes an account of the conceptual domain associated with the English lexeme earth [...] The semantics of the lexeme, or any lexeme for that matter, is seen here as an integrated network of its senses, understood in global terms as the totality of these senses. Such is the understanding of word meaning proposed in Langacker's network model. In a more comprehensive [dynamic] understanding of word meaning, the network model can be extended to cover all of a word's uses. As a theoretical model for describing this dynamism I adopt Catherine Fuchs's approach [...] According to Fuchs, words function in semantic space and their potential meanings are exploited and realized in particular uses. Through its various features, a text modifies, shifts and extends the semantic potential of a word. The emergent, "mobile" textual meaning of the word is always to a large extent indeterminate and covers a portion of semantic space which can only be roughly specified.

Poetic Rhythm: Structure and Performance -- An Empirical Study in Cognitive Poetics

Book

May 2012

REUVEN TSUR

Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction

Book

Jun 2005

Peter Stockwell

'The suburbs of your good pleasure': Cognition, Culture and the Bases of Metaphoric Structure: 4: Shakespeare studies today

Chapter

Nov 2017

Eve Sweetser

Imagination and the Meaningful Brain

Book

Feb 2003

Arnold H. Modell

The ultimate goal of the cognitive sciences is to understand how the brain works—how it turns "matter into imagination." In Imagination and the Meaningful Brain, psychoanalyst Arnold Modell claims that subjective human experience must be included in any scientific explanation of how the mind/brain works. Contrary to current attempts to describe mental functioning as a form of computation, his view is that the construction of meaning is not the same as information processing. The intrapsychic complexities of human psychology, as observed through introspection and empathic knowledge of other minds, must be added to the third-person perspective of cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Assuming that other mammals are conscious and conscious of their feelings, Modell emphasizes evolutionary continuities and discontinuities of emotion. The limbic system, the emotional brain, is of ancient origin, but only humans have the capacity for generative imagination. By means of metaphor, we are able to interpret, displace, and transform our feelings. To bolster his argument, Modell draws on a variety of disciplines—including psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology, neurobiology, evolutionary biology, linguistics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. Only by integrating the objectivity of neuroscience, the phenomenology of introspection, and the intersubjective knowledge of psychoanalysis, he claims, will we be able fully to understand how the mind works. Bradford Books imprint

Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis

Book

Jan 2002

Reasoning and rhetoric: Conceptual blending in political and religious rhetoric

Article

Jan 2003

Seana Coulson

Metaphor and iconicity: A cognitive approach to analyzing texts

Book

Jan 2004

Masako K. Hiraga

Metaphor and Iconicity attempts to clarify the interplay of metaphor and iconicity in the creation and interpretation of spoken and written texts from a cognitive perspective. There are various degrees in which metaphor and iconicity manifest themselves, ranging from sound symbolism and parallelism in poetic discourse to word order, inflectional forms, and other grammatical structures in ordinary discourse. The book makes unique contributions to the study of the relationship of form and meaning.

Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Literary Studies: State of the Art in Cognitive Poetics

Abstract

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