Overview

Drawing on range of text genres including novels, poems, health forums, holiday guestbooks, prayers, political songs and news stories, each chapter uses cognitive linguistics to shed light on the meanings and meaning-making processes invoked when we encounter texts belonging to different literary and political genres. The book presents new insights into the workings of textual phenomena such as metaphor, viewpoint and deixis and also sheds light on more elusive, epiphenomenal qualities such as a text's ambience, atmosphere, power, ideology or persuasiveness. It also takes new strides in cognitive text analysis by exploiting experimental and ethnographic methods to empirically investigate readers' reception of, and resistance to, texts.

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9781474449991

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"Literary texts and political texts are so divergent that it seems unrealistic to bring them under one roof. The scholarly disciplines related to the two sets of texts, stylistics and critical discourse analysis (CDA), respectively, are traditionally known to be divergent. This volume successfully brings the two fields together under the umbrella of cognitive linguistics (CL), which provides 'the common toolkit for close, linguistically motivated, textual analysis' (p. 6)... In this volume, 'cognitive linguistic approaches' is rather broad and all-encompassing. Three strands of theory are adopted in the studies... Although these theories vary in their contents and focus, they share in common the basic CL tenet: Language is experiential and embodied. The chapters in this volume are committed to the general principles of CL to account for processes of meaning construction in texts and discourse. The volume also helps refine and extend CL theories by contributing new insights into the workings of linguistic concepts like metaphor, transitivity or event-structure, viewpoint, deixis and other attentional or perspectival phenomena.--Hongwei Zhan, Hangzhou Normal University, P.R. China ""Discourse Studies"" Written by top scholars in cognitive stylistics, poetics, and critical discourse analysis, this groundbreaking collection shows the true breadth and potential of a 'usage-based' framework.--Professor Barbara Dancygier, University of British Columbia"

Author Information

Christopher Hart is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at Lancaster University.

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