Archives

  • Disnarration and the Performance of Storytelling in Taylor Swift’s folklore and evermore
    Vol. 11 No. 1 (2022)

    Chloe Harrison (Aston University) & Helen Ringrow (University of Portsmouth)

    In a similar way to dramatic performances and plays, song lyrics establish a complex discourse structure whereby listeners are placed in a position to overhear ‘the pretence of a conversation constructed to convey the performer’s meaning’ (Nahajec 2019: 25; see also Short 1996: 169). In Taylor Swift’s songwriting, listeners are positioned not only to eavesdrop on the narratives presented but are also invited to conceptualise and enact particular roles and scenarios in the discourse. This paper offers a stylistic analysis of songwriting and narrative structure across Swift’s oeuvre to identify how disnarration strategies are used to build stories in her two sister albums written and produced during the Covid-19 pandemic, folklore (2020) and evermore (2020). Specifically, this study examines how disnarration characterises the albums’ narrators, establishes narrator-narratee relationships and invites listeners to adopt a participatory role in the meaning-making process. Through close analysis of four songs across the two albums, this paper builds on developing studies of the stylistics of songwriting (see West 2019) and argues that disnarration strategies foreground particular themes within the discourse, such as nostalgia, wistfulness and regret, and contribute to the fictionalisation and self-aware storytelling characteristic of these albums’ storyworlds.

  • Bare Root Infinitives in German: Facets of Meaning in Poetry and Non-Literary Discourse
    Vol. 10 No. 2 (2021)

    Irene Rapp (University of Tübingen), Susanne Riecker (University of Tübingen), Saskia Brockmann, Christian Fortmann (University of Tübingen) & Jonas Bozenhard (University of Oxford)

    The aim of this article is to show how linguistic and literary studies can benefit from the joint analysis of linguistic structures in poetry. Firstly, the analysis of poetry has an important impact on linguistic theory as it leads our attention to specific structures and meanings that so far have not been considered. Secondly, a close linguistic analysis can reveal hitherto overlooked facets of meaning which have a great significance for the overall interpretation of a poem. We focus on Bare Root Infinitives (BRIs) in German. As they lack the features for tense, mood, person and number, they are more flexible in meaning than finite forms. When looking at poetry, besides the well-known deontic and bouletic meanings (cf. Reis 1995, 2003; Gärtner 2014) a third meaning that we call reactive meaning stands out. Remarkably, this reactive meaning can also be found in everyday language. Its specific semantic properties show that a semantic analysis of BRIs in the style of Kaufmann (2012) is adequate: modality, but not non-referentiality, is a grammatically given semantic property of BRIs. The specific case study of the poem ‘muster fixieren’ (‘fixing patterns’) by Nico Bleutge reveals how the restricted context of the poem interacts with the different interpretations of BRIs, resulting in a complex interpretation of the text.

  • Rapport-Management Strategies in Conflict Situations: A Pragmatic Reading of Ahmed Yerima’s Hard Ground
    Vol. 10 No. 1 (2021)

    Chuka Ononye (University of Nigeria)

    The (mis)management of rapport amongst groups in Niger Delta (ND) communities has become a significant issue, which Ahmed Yerima’s Hard Ground (HG) depicts as having the capacity to aid or control the conflicts in the region. Linguistic studies on Yerima’s drama from the perspective of pragmatics have tended to use pragmatic acts to identify the discourse value of proverbs and functions of characters’ utterances but have not accounted for the politeness strategies utilised for rapport management, especially in conflict situations. This article, drawing on a rapport-management model of politeness and aspects of speech act discourse, identifies the face, sociality rights, and interactional goals that characterise the conflict-motivated dialogues sampled in HG, and reveals the rapport-management (RM) strategies through which these are managed in the text. Three conflict situations can be observed as prompting different RM strategies: cause-effect identification (CEI), militancy support (MSP), and disagreement (DSG) situations. CEI is marked by incriminating (involving eliciting and informing acts) and exonerating (including complimenting and acknowledging acts) strategies; MSP is indexed by strategies of persuasion (realised with face-enhancing/threatening acts), whereas DSG is typified by requesting (featuring explicit head acts and alerters) and blaming strategies (including insulting and threatening, aggravating moves). Generally, the requesting, blaming, and exonerating strategies are largely used by the ND youth in HG to probe, threaten, or disagree on specific issues, while the incriminating and persuasion strategies are mainly employed by the women to indict, influence, and predict future actions. The study of RM in the conflict situations depicted in the play sheds light on the often neglected cause of conflicts in contemporary Africa.

  • Narrative Structures in Cross-Linguistic Perspective: English, Hobongan, and Daqan
    Vol. 9 No. 5 (2020)

    Marla Perkins, Ph.D. (Independent Scholar)

    Four main informational elements have been suggested and studied as central aspects of narrative discourse: causality, character, location, time. The research that scholars have previously undertaken on these aspects has been primarily on Indo-European languages, and more specifically on the European side of that language family. The linguistic limitations have indicated that character is the aspect of narrative that readers/listeners attend to most closely. However, in examining narrative discourses from non-Indo-European languages, challenges to the presumed primacy of character emerge. In a partial report on field work conducted in Borneo in 2012-2015, I compare and contrast patterns in the rankings of the four main aspects of narrative in three languages, English, Hobongan and Daqan. I also note the strategies by which the languages make their respective rankings clear, including focus particles (Hobongan), specificity of description (each), and amount of information provided about the aspects (each). I suggest that analyses of the patterns and rankings of information in narrative be included in typological categorizations and linguistic descriptions of languages.

  • ‘You don’t mind my calling you Harry?’ Terms of Address in John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy
    Vol. 9 No. 4 (2020)

    Peter Backhaus (Waseda University)

    This paper examines the use of address terms in John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy (Updike 1995). The first part of the analysis provides a comprehensive overview of the great variety of terms used to address the protagonist, Harry Angstrom, in the decades covered by the novels. The second part focuses on two important side characters, Reverend Eccles and Harry’s mother-in-law. It demonstrates how address term usage with these two characters reflects ongoing changes in their relationship with Harry. The main aim of the paper is to demonstrate the potential of fictional data for the study of address terms and, in return, to capture the manifold functions of address terms as a literary device in fiction.

  • The Shared Communicative Act of Theatrical Texts in Performance: A Relevance Theoretic Approach
    Vol. 9 No. 3 (2020)

    Anne Furlong (University of Prince Edward Island)

    This article adopts a relevance theoretic approach to meaning making in theatrical texts and performances. Theatrical texts communicate immediately to multiple audiences: readers, actors, directors, producers, and designers. They communicate less directly to the writer’s ultimate audience –the playgoer or spectator –through the medium of performance. But playgoers are not passive receptacles for interpretations distilled in rehearsal, enacted through performance, or developed in study and reflection. Rather, in the framework of communication postulated by relevance theory, the audience is an active participant in making meaning. I will briefly review a range of approaches to meaning making in theatre, and then outline my view of a relevance theoretic account of the vital contributions of the audience in constructing the interpretation of performance, treating it as a communicative act

  • ‘A style which defies convention, tradition, homogeneity, prudence, and sometimes even syntax’: Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence
    Vol. 9 No. 2 (2020)

    Lisa Nais (University of Aberdeen)

    Combining the methods of linguistics and literary criticism, this article takes a fresh look at two texts that have been analysed ad nauseam: Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. I use James’s late style as a touchstone to compare and contrast the two texts. Analysing syntax by means of close textual analysis of the novels’ opening paragraphs as well as their metaphorical language, and employing the corpus analysis programme AntConc to survey the entire texts, I aim to show that James’s 1880 text anticipates his late style and Wharton’s 1920 text appropriates it to suit her own agenda. However, in respectively anticipating and appropriating this style, James and Wharton create different effects. James intensifies his female protagonist’s ‘world of thought and feeling’ (Eliot 1963: 56), creating a fictional world with literary equality for both genders, while Wharton subverts gender roles in a scathing critique of Gilded Age society, which did not allow for this other ‘world of thought and feeling’. In addition to positioning both novels as feminist, this article compares Wharton’s writing to James’s, but without presupposing the latter’s influence on the former. Instead, acknowledging the fluidity of style, I aim to put forward a convincing case that there are subtle differences that make these authors’ styles Jamesian and Whartonian, respectively.

  • ‘To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life?’ A Discourse Analysis of English and German Reader Responses to Sex-/Gender-Neutral Language in The Cook and the Carpenter
    Vol. 9 No. 1 (2020)

    Christiane Luck (University College London)

    Linguistic research and linguistic activism have resulted in key changes to official language use. However, revisions remain contested and many English and German speakers continue to employ male generic terms. In this article I explore whether the encounter with sex-/gender-neutral terminology in June Arnold’s novel The Cook and the Carpenter can prompt readers to review their language use and consider alternatives. Based on narrative research, my premise is that fiction can create familiarity with new terms, which is the first step toward wider linguistic change. I frame my investigation with Wittgenstein’s notion that ‘to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life’, and put it to the test with a discourse analysis of English and German reader responses. The results of my study show that Arnold’s novel stimulates fruitful debate around the issue of linguistic representation. Based on my findings, I propose to integrate literary texts which engage with the issue of sex/gender and language into educational settings to further promote neutral/inclusive language use.

  • ‘He just isn’t my Frost’: The Television Adaptation of R.D. Wingfield’s Jack Frost
    Vol. 8 No. 1 (2019)

    Simon Statham (Queen’s University Belfast)

    This article presents an analysis of the police television series A Touch of Frost (Yorkshire Television, 1992) and the crime novels by Rodney Wingfield upon which it is based. In order to analyse the way the protagonist, Inspector Jack Frost, is characterised in either version, data is drawn from the pilot episode of the series and Wingfield’s debut novel Frost at Christmas (1984). Wingfield was less than impressed with television’s version of Frost, stating, ‘He just isn’t my Frost’. The rationale for this article is to apply established models in stylistics to investigate the differences between the original and the adaptation. A core motivation for stylistics is to ‘support initial impressions in various extracts’ readings’ and to ‘describe the readers’ response with some precision’ (Gregoriou 2007: 19); this article therefore offers a close linguistic explanation for an author’s dissatisfaction with the adaptation of his own work. The famously reticent Wingfield did not elaborate in detail on why he disapproved of the television version of Frost, although several critics observed that Wingfield felt television had ‘softened’ his creation. This article contends that ‘softness’ is represented in language through politeness strategies adopted by speakers whilst impoliteness represents the ‘tougher’ speech of Wingfield’s original iteration of Jack Frost. In order to demonstrate this contention, this study will analyse pragmatic elements of the dialogue of both novel and television versions of Frost through the analytical framework for impoliteness developed by Culpeper (1996; 2010). This framework will be integrated into the model for analysing the elements of narrative outlined by Simpson and Montgomery (1995), in turn suggesting an elaboration of this model. In investigating whether television’s Jack Frost is ‘softer’ than the character envisaged by Wingfield, free direct speech and accompanying physical behaviour in novel and television adaptation are analysed, focussing on whether the perceived softness of the latter has been partly achieved by making the speech of Frost less impolite on television.

  • Overlapping Speech in Caryl Churchill’s Hot Fudge: Constructing Interactional and Interpersonal Contexts
    Vol. 7 No. 3 (2018)

    Andriy Ivanchenko (Chukyo University)

    The script of Caryl Churchill’s short play Hot Fudge (like several other plays by this author) contains detailed directions for overlapping conversation. At certain points in the play these may be contributing to a number of effects similar to those described for the naturally occurring ‘collaborative floor’, such as enthusiasm and mutual support. The importance of an interactive approach to constructed conversation is pointed out in the article, particularly that of analysing the overlapped speaker’s response to appreciate the discursive significance of the overlapping turn. For instance, acknowledging and/or reusing the other speaker’s overlapping formulations in a non-oppositional format can show an understanding of these contributions as collaboratively oriented. Therefore, such an interpretation of overlapping dialogue in a dramatic text will affect the reader’s understanding of the interpersonal context (e.g. dominance-seeking/mutual support/collaboration between pairs of speakers). In particular, this approach is taken to show how certain kinds of overlapping similar to those described for the naturally occurring conversation can be used dramatically to supportive rather than conflictive ends. Overall, it is shown how the dramatic characters’ interpersonal orientations become inferable from their use of certain dialogic options.

  • Fictional Creature Pronominalization
    Vol. 7 No. 2 (2018)

    Linda Flores Ohlson (University of Gothenburg)

    In this article, pronominalization is analyzed in reference to the fantastic creatures in Guillermo del Toro’s novels: the trilogy The Strain (del Toro & Hogan 2009; 2010; 2011), Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark: Blackwood’s Guide to Dangerous Fairies (del Toro & Golden 2011), and Trollhunters (del Toro & Kraus 2015). The analysis is based on the notion that an intricate connection between human and nonhuman fictional characters is created and expressed through specific usages of pronouns.

  • Immersion in Digital Fiction
    Vol. 7 No. 1 (2018)

    Alice Bell (Sheffield Hallam University), Astrid Ensslin (University of Alberta), Isabelle van der Bom (Sheffield Hallam University) & Jen Smith (Sheffield Hallam University)

    In this article, we profile what we define as an “empirical cognitive poetic” approach to immersion in digital fiction by combining text-driven stylistic analysis with insights from theories of cognition and an empirical study. We provide empirically substantiated insights to show how immersion is experienced cognitively and site-specifically by using Andy Campbell and Judi Alston’s (2015) digital fiction installation WALLPAPER as a case study. Our approach is unique in that it marks the first systematic attempt at analysing immersive features in digital fiction using a replicable method and, perhaps more importantly, at empirically investigating these immersive features. While current theories of immersion suggest that it is a completely absorbing experience, we show that immersion is an intermittent process, stimulated by multiple immersive features which interact. We also argue that any investigation into immersion in digital media must address the doubly-embodied nature of that reading experience and propose the category of ‘doubly-deictic I’ to define first-person pronoun use that signals double-situatedness. We empirically verify that immersion in digital fiction can be categorised as either narrative or ludic immersion. However, we also show that spatio-temporal immersion must take place before any other forms of immersion can. We also offer a new analytical method for immersive features in digital fiction by developing deictic shift theory for the affordances of digital media. We add the categories of ‘interactional deixis’ and ‘audio deixis’ to account for the multimodal nature of immersion in digital fiction. We also show how extra-textual features can contribute to or enhance immersion and thus propose that they should be accounted for when analysing immersion across media. While we focus on one case-study in this article, we suggest that the analytical framework and reader response protocol we have developed can be applied to other texts.

     
  • Research Agendas in Literary Linguistics
    Vol. 6 No. 1 (2017)

    Edited by Anja Müller-Wood (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz) and Christoph Unger (Norwegian University of Science and Technology Trondheim)

    This special issue brings together articles based on papers given at the First Literary Linguistics Conference: Research Agendas in Literary Linguistics, held in April 2015 at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. Embracing a wide range of methodologies, applied to an equally diverse selection of literary sources, the present papers provide an illuminating survey of the field of literary linguistics and will hopefully inspire further research.

  • Processing Effort and Poetic Closure
    Vol. 5 No. 4 (2016)

    Nigel Fabb (University of Strathclyde)

    Smith (1968) argues that poems may end with formal changes which produce an experience of closure in the reader. I argue that formal changes do not directly cause an experience of closure. Instead, changes in poetic form always demand increased processing effort from the reader, whether they involve new forms, shifts from more to less regular form, or from less to more regular form. I use relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995) to argue that the increased processing effort encourages the reader to formulate rich and relevant thoughts, including the thought 'this poem has closure'. Closure is thus the content of a thought rather than a type of experience. I further argue that 'closure' is a term whose meaning cannot be fully understood, which makes the thought 'this poem has closure' into a schematic belief of the kind which Sperber shows has great richness and productivity. This is one of the reasons that the thought 'this poem has closure' achieves sufficient relevance to justify the effort put into processing the end of the poem.

  • Current Issues in the Linguistic Analysis of Literary Translation
    Vol. 5 No. 3 (2016)

    Edited by Leena Kolehmainen (University of Eastern Finland), Esa Penttilä (University of Eastern Finland) and Piet van Poucke (Ghent University)

    This special issue contains seven state-of-the-art contributions on the current linguistic study of literary translation. The articles discuss questions of translation as a special process of text production and explore linguistic properties of translated texts. Themes addressed cover a wide spectrum of issues including the use of neologisms, features of spoken discourse, individual and societal multilingualism, and grammatical categories such as the passive voice. These phenomena are studied from the perspective of previously formulated hypotheses and general claims of translation that are related to, for example, retranslation, indirect translation, and translation universals. When analyzed from the multidisciplinary perspective that is prevailing in the articles of this special issue, they can offer new insights not only for translation researchers but also for linguists and literary scholars.

  • Approaches to Fictional Dialogue
    Vol. 5 No. 2 (2016)

    Edited by Aino Koivisto and Elise Nykänen (University of Helsinki)

    This special issue is devoted to a cross-disciplinary investigation of a specific literary phenomenon, fictional dialogue. Fictional dialogue is used to refer to passages of character-character conversation within a literary text. More specifically, the articles of the issue deal with fictional dialogue as a narrative mode in prose fiction. The issue aims to engender an appreciation and a better understanding of the workings of dialogue by drawing on the insights and methods from both literary studies and linguistics. These methods include a rhetorical-ethical approach to narrative, cognitive and “natural” narratology, the study of everyday conversational storytelling, and Conversation Analysis (CA). Combining these methods helps us to understand that while dialogue is a central means to depict character-character relationships it also serves other levels of communication in a narrative and thus contributes to the reader's comprehension of the narrative design's rhetorical and ethical dimensions. The articles also suggest that while understanding dialogue depends partly on the reader’s experiences of real-life conversation, the interpretation of dialogue is determined by the overall design of a literary text and the historically changing conventions.

  • Metaphors we may not live by
    Vol. 5 No. 1 (2016)

    David Lowell Hoover (New York University)

    Metaphors We Live By created an immediate stir in 1980, and it continues to spur interest in cognitive linguistics, cognitive stylistics, and metaphor theory. This article uses both collocations and random samples of words used in conceptual metaphors to search for corpus evidence of the pervasiveness of conceptual metaphor that was unavailable to Lakoff and Johnson. Some metaphors, such as TIME IS MONEY, are pervasive in giant natural language corpora. Others, such as MORE IS UP, are frequent in clearly and consciously metaphorical forms, but relatively rare in the basic forms that would clearly show that we use metaphor to understand more abstract concepts in terms of concrete ones. Some, including ARGUMENT IS WAR, that Lakoff and Johnson discuss throughout their book, are poorly represented. Some gaps in evidence probably result from multiple ways of expressing a complex conceptual metaphors, but others suggest that intuitive plausibility is an insecure basis for argument.

  • Fraud and Fairy Tales
    Vol. 4 No. 1 (2015)

    Florian Hiß (The Artic University of Norway)

    Most of us receive numerous spam e-mails, texts that in one or the other way try to convince us to engage in the transaction of enormous sums of money, promising enormous benefits. In reality, such scam e-mails are fraudulent attempts to swindle money from unsuspecting Internet users. Language, its social contexts, and the composition of texts play a crucial role in the scammers’ strategies to approach their victims. This article uncovers and discusses some of the linguistic strategies by which scammers try to shape a sense of identity and mutual relationship – in the face of virtual anonymity –, and to involve their readers personally. In their attempts to get the recipients involved, scammers combine cultural indexicals, interactional roles, and narrative strategies. The analysis distinguishes three different narrative strategies in scam e-mails: Based on first, second, and third person stories, scammers establish links with the recipients by combining fictional content with real-world contexts. Some of the narratives display quite elaborate and artful traits and involve prototypical functions of traditional fairy tales. Hereby they implicitly connect the story content with the interactional roles of e-mail communication.

  • "Do You Read Me?" Metaphor as a Pathway to the Conceptualisation of Literary Identity
    Vol. 3 No. 1 (2014)

    Julia Vaeßen and Timo Lothmann (RWTH Aachen)

    Establishing coherent identity patterns for literary characters in novels is a difficult task. In this respect, we assume that readers rely on pre-stored cultural models in order to construct mental models of the text content, including character identity. By significantly extending the approach by Van Dijk and Kintsch and going beyond the related accounts of Schneider and of Culpeper, we aim to clarify the constitutive role of conceptual metaphor as proposed by Lakoff et al. in processes of literary identity construction. The analysis of a corpus of three contemporary novels supports our claim that conceptual metaphors and the mapping of domains involved interact with cultural models and connect text phenomena to such prior knowledge structures. On this basis, we provide an integrated model of literary identity construction which acknowledges the constitutive value of conceptual metaphors in literary identity construction.