1

COGNITIVE STYLISTICS

“Speech is external thought, and thought

internal speech.”- Anto ine R ivaro l

2

One view of listening comprehension describes comprehension of a speaker’s message as the internal reproduction of that message in the listener’s mind, so that successful listening reproduces meaning much as the speaker intended. (Clark and Clark, 1977)

3

ORIGIN I. A. Richards laid the foundations for

cognitive stylistics. It was from cognitive psychology that Richards drew upon to build a theory of literature and interpretation – which in itself prefigured cognitive stylistics. 

4

COGNITIVE STYLISTICS analyzes an author's idiolect, his

individual language traits.

combines the kind of explicit, rigorous and detailed linguistic analysis of literary texts that is typical of the stylistics tradition with a systematic and theoretically informed consideration of the cognitive structures and processes that underlie the production and reception of language . .

5

COGNITIVE STYLISTICSis the interface between

linguistics, literary studies and cognitive science

extends the boundaries of linguistic analysis of literature by articulating different theories such as schema theory, cognitive metaphor theory, conceptual metaphor theory, text world theory, blendings, mental space theories etc.

6

SCHEMA THEORY

all experiences are stored in the memory and the human mind activates and draws upon this memory in the process of understanding or grappling with new experiences or data

for the purposes of interpretation “the human mind actively constructs various types of cognitive representations (codes, features, meanings, structured sets of elements) that interpret linguistic input.” [Grasser et al 1997]

7

TEXT WORLD THEORY WERTH (1999) GAVINS (2007)

all discourses are characterized by construction of a set of richly defined conceptualized spaces known as ‘worlds’:

Discourse world – spatio temporal context in which the discourse take place which contains 2 discourse participants which are the writer and reader or speaker and listener and naturally occurring language event such as discourse.

8

Text world – text driven process whereby linguistic cues activate relevant general or specific knowledge upon which further inferences about the parameters of the text world space may be drawn. The world building propositions in the text provide deictic and referential information which partially establish the text world’s situational variables such as time, location, entities and interrelationship, while function advancing propositions are those which provide information about actions, mental processes, states and attributes of entities in the text world.

9

Sub-world – arise as a result of a deictic shifts or modal shits away from the matrix world from which they arise. Modal world switches are cued by propositions which are modalized according to the conventional separation between deontic, boulomaic and epistemic contexts and account for such things as expressions of beliefs, desire and obligation. Metaphors are a type of epistemic sub-world.

10

METAPHORS

play a very important role in text worlds because, in actuality, we make sense of the text world through our knowledge of the real world. (Porto Ruekijo, 2007)

IRONY -used to convey the opposite of what is said: words are not taken in their basic literal sense (Du Marsais, Des Tropes)

11

"What is new about cognitive stylistics is the way in which linguistic analysis is systematically based on theories that relate linguistic choices to cognitive structures and processes. This provides more systematic and explicit accounts of the relationship between texts on the one hand and responses and interpretations on the other."

-- (Elena Semino and Jonathan Culpeper, Foreword to Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text

Analysis.John Benjamins, 2002)