Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1177/09639470221134381
V. Sotirova
Geoff Hall took degrees separately in English literature and in applied linguistics at the universities of Sussex and Birmingham, respectively. A career in English teaching of all kinds has taken him around the world with posts notably in Singapore, Poland, Spain, UK and China. In every place he always made the effort to learn something of the local languages and literatures which has enriched his life immensely. His most widely cited publication is the book Literature in Language Education (2015a). He was Editor of Language and Literature from 2010-2016. Geoff is currently Visiting Professor of Stylistics, University of Nottingham Ningbo, China, and Professor II, English Language Education, Nord University, Norway. He is trying to retire but remains an incorrigible lifelong learner and travelled widely before Covid 19 hit us all. In this interview, he discusses the importance of pedagogy to the practice of stylistics and explains the important links to be made between pedagogical stylistics and second language acquisition. He argues for a greater level of integration between stylistics and non-linguistically oriented literary studies, aimed at ensuring that stylistic analyses are grounded in an informed appreciation of historical and textual context.
{"title":"Broadening horizons: An interview with Geoff Hall","authors":"V. Sotirova","doi":"10.1177/09639470221134381","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470221134381","url":null,"abstract":"Geoff Hall took degrees separately in English literature and in applied linguistics at the universities of Sussex and Birmingham, respectively. A career in English teaching of all kinds has taken him around the world with posts notably in Singapore, Poland, Spain, UK and China. In every place he always made the effort to learn something of the local languages and literatures which has enriched his life immensely. His most widely cited publication is the book Literature in Language Education (2015a). He was Editor of Language and Literature from 2010-2016. Geoff is currently Visiting Professor of Stylistics, University of Nottingham Ningbo, China, and Professor II, English Language Education, Nord University, Norway. He is trying to retire but remains an incorrigible lifelong learner and travelled widely before Covid 19 hit us all. In this interview, he discusses the importance of pedagogy to the practice of stylistics and explains the important links to be made between pedagogical stylistics and second language acquisition. He argues for a greater level of integration between stylistics and non-linguistically oriented literary studies, aimed at ensuring that stylistic analyses are grounded in an informed appreciation of historical and textual context.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43146794","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1177/09639470221134383
D. McIntyre
Katie Wales was Professor of English Language at Royal Holloway College, University of London, before moving to the University of Leeds to become Professor of Modern English Language. She later moved to the University of Sheffield and is currently Honorary Professor in the School of English at the University of Nottingham. She is a co-founder of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) and was instrumental in setting up the journal Language and Literature, serving as its second editor between 1996 and 2004. In this interview she explains how she found out about stylistics as an undergraduate student; how she established an academic career; and how she was able to integrate stylistics into her teaching in the face of resistance from the literary establishment. She discusses her long-standing interest in dialectology and the importance of incorporating a historical perspective into stylistic work. She also discusses the importance of PALA as a support network for stylisticians, particularly in the light of the current assault on the humanities in the UK and elsewhere.
{"title":"‘There was all this terminology proliferating and the students needed to know precise terms, not vague or impressionistic ones’: An interview with Katie Wales","authors":"D. McIntyre","doi":"10.1177/09639470221134383","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470221134383","url":null,"abstract":"Katie Wales was Professor of English Language at Royal Holloway College, University of London, before moving to the University of Leeds to become Professor of Modern English Language. She later moved to the University of Sheffield and is currently Honorary Professor in the School of English at the University of Nottingham. She is a co-founder of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) and was instrumental in setting up the journal Language and Literature, serving as its second editor between 1996 and 2004. In this interview she explains how she found out about stylistics as an undergraduate student; how she established an academic career; and how she was able to integrate stylistics into her teaching in the face of resistance from the literary establishment. She discusses her long-standing interest in dialectology and the importance of incorporating a historical perspective into stylistic work. She also discusses the importance of PALA as a support network for stylisticians, particularly in the light of the current assault on the humanities in the UK and elsewhere.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43710785","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1177/09639470221134377
Hazel Price
Last year in his final ‘Year’s Work’ as Reviews Editor, Simon Statham wrote about the effect that coronavirus and lockdown had had on the way we engaged with our working lives. In the article, Simon reflected on how he had been somewhat naı̈ve when, in ‘The Year’s Work’ for 2019, he signed off by looking forward to a year of travel and international conferences as the world returned to pre-Covid ‘normal’. In his reflections of the year prior, Simon made a case for extending Simpson’s (2014: 4) ‘three Rs’ of stylistics to include ‘resilience’, to reflect the varied ways stylisticians around the world had adapted to working in the Covid landscape. Of course, what Simon was not to know when he wrote ‘The Year’s Work in Stylistics 2019’was how long Covid would affect our lives. As I retrospectively write this ‘Year’s Work’ for 2021 in 2022, it is still the case that Covid is affecting our working lives; however, arguably the new ways we have developed for staying connected in a socially disconnected world are now bringing new benefits as virtual interaction is no longer a deviation from the academic norm. An example of this is the many ways that colleagues from around the world are able to attend conferences which would be unfeasible for them to attend in person, and how virtual meetings have fostered collaboration between researchers internationally. The international travel that Simon hoped for in 2020 has returned for many of us and conference organisers have welcomed delegates in person and virtually as they embrace the hybrid conference format. The stylistics world is opening back up and testimony to this is the fact that PALAwas able to hold its first face-to-face conference since 2019 in Liverpool. The conference, ‘Style and Senses’, hosted in the beautiful city of Aix (and organised by academics at Aix-Marseille University and University Paul Valéry – Montpellier 3), was a welcome opportunity for many stylisticians to reengage in the lively discussion the conference format allows. Another key event in the stylistics calendar was the one-day ‘Applied Stylistics
{"title":"The year’s work in stylistics 2021","authors":"Hazel Price","doi":"10.1177/09639470221134377","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470221134377","url":null,"abstract":"Last year in his final ‘Year’s Work’ as Reviews Editor, Simon Statham wrote about the effect that coronavirus and lockdown had had on the way we engaged with our working lives. In the article, Simon reflected on how he had been somewhat naı̈ve when, in ‘The Year’s Work’ for 2019, he signed off by looking forward to a year of travel and international conferences as the world returned to pre-Covid ‘normal’. In his reflections of the year prior, Simon made a case for extending Simpson’s (2014: 4) ‘three Rs’ of stylistics to include ‘resilience’, to reflect the varied ways stylisticians around the world had adapted to working in the Covid landscape. Of course, what Simon was not to know when he wrote ‘The Year’s Work in Stylistics 2019’was how long Covid would affect our lives. As I retrospectively write this ‘Year’s Work’ for 2021 in 2022, it is still the case that Covid is affecting our working lives; however, arguably the new ways we have developed for staying connected in a socially disconnected world are now bringing new benefits as virtual interaction is no longer a deviation from the academic norm. An example of this is the many ways that colleagues from around the world are able to attend conferences which would be unfeasible for them to attend in person, and how virtual meetings have fostered collaboration between researchers internationally. The international travel that Simon hoped for in 2020 has returned for many of us and conference organisers have welcomed delegates in person and virtually as they embrace the hybrid conference format. The stylistics world is opening back up and testimony to this is the fact that PALAwas able to hold its first face-to-face conference since 2019 in Liverpool. The conference, ‘Style and Senses’, hosted in the beautiful city of Aix (and organised by academics at Aix-Marseille University and University Paul Valéry – Montpellier 3), was a welcome opportunity for many stylisticians to reengage in the lively discussion the conference format allows. Another key event in the stylistics calendar was the one-day ‘Applied Stylistics","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43615286","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-18DOI: 10.1177/09639470221122101
Rodney Hermeston
This article represents the first illustration of the tools of disability stylistics on a literary text. It does so by examining the representation of blindness in an extract from Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Treasure Island in which the character Pew is introduced. The article outlines concepts relating to the othering of disabled people before describing two major cultural stereotypes of disability that scholars argue persist to the present day. These are the pathetic and pitiful disabled person and the disabled individual as evil. Disability scholars have identified language as a key area for the construction and perpetuation of stereotypes of disability. However, scholarship has tended to focus on labels, or discourse with language use considered in context. This article confirms that labels and basic description are crucial elements through a consideration of noun phrases. Nevertheless, the article also utilises the models of transitivity, speech acts and im/politeness, and elements of the framework of appraisal. The article identifies a pivotal moment in the extract in which Pew is transformed from a potentially (though ambiguous) pitiful figure into a realisation of the evil stereotype, and shows that all stylistic frameworks outlined permit these depictions to be analysed. The article calls for the tools to be used to test the claims that stereotypes persist into the present day. It also concludes that disability stylistics should be tested on representations of other disabilities. It argues that the tools need also to be used to analyse other disability stereotypes.
{"title":"Disability stylistics: An illustration based on Pew in Stevenson’s Treasure Island","authors":"Rodney Hermeston","doi":"10.1177/09639470221122101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470221122101","url":null,"abstract":"This article represents the first illustration of the tools of disability stylistics on a literary text. It does so by examining the representation of blindness in an extract from Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Treasure Island in which the character Pew is introduced. The article outlines concepts relating to the othering of disabled people before describing two major cultural stereotypes of disability that scholars argue persist to the present day. These are the pathetic and pitiful disabled person and the disabled individual as evil. Disability scholars have identified language as a key area for the construction and perpetuation of stereotypes of disability. However, scholarship has tended to focus on labels, or discourse with language use considered in context. This article confirms that labels and basic description are crucial elements through a consideration of noun phrases. Nevertheless, the article also utilises the models of transitivity, speech acts and im/politeness, and elements of the framework of appraisal. The article identifies a pivotal moment in the extract in which Pew is transformed from a potentially (though ambiguous) pitiful figure into a realisation of the evil stereotype, and shows that all stylistic frameworks outlined permit these depictions to be analysed. The article calls for the tools to be used to test the claims that stereotypes persist into the present day. It also concludes that disability stylistics should be tested on representations of other disabilities. It argues that the tools need also to be used to analyse other disability stereotypes.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48641103","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-30DOI: 10.1177/09639470221096601
M. Bednarek, Liza-Mare Syron
While stylistics has successfully integrated the study of language use in film and television, relatively little research has tried to systematically classify the functions of television or film dialogue – i.e. to taxonomise its range of potential stylistic functions such as characterisation or the creation of consistency. Most stylistic research has also focussed on traditional US (Hollywood) or European narrative mass media, rather than culturally-diverse or Indigenous-authored film and television. This article aims to make a contribution to both of these under-examined fields by offering a case study of the stylistic functions of Australian Aboriginal English lexis in three successful Indigenous-authored television series. The three series (Redfern Now, Cleverman and Mystery Road) are all important for the television canon and were broadcast in Australia as well as exported internationally. Using an existing corpus with dialogue from these series as repository, this article illustrates the different functions of Australian Aboriginal English lexis in its surrounding text by critically examining multiple dialogue extracts from the three narratives. Quotations from Indigenous screen creatives are interwoven with the analysis where relevant. We argue that such lexis fulfils many functions beyond characterisation and demonstrate the significance of communicating culture and identity in Indigenous-authored drama. The study has implications both for the stylistic analysis of the multiple functions of television/film dialogue and for the study of narratives that feature significant creative involvement by marginalised, subjugated, colonised, or otherwise historically excluded communities – including but not limited to Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait islander people(s) in Australia.
{"title":"Functions of dialogue in (television) drama: A case study of Indigenous-authored television narratives","authors":"M. Bednarek, Liza-Mare Syron","doi":"10.1177/09639470221096601","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470221096601","url":null,"abstract":"While stylistics has successfully integrated the study of language use in film and television, relatively little research has tried to systematically classify the functions of television or film dialogue – i.e. to taxonomise its range of potential stylistic functions such as characterisation or the creation of consistency. Most stylistic research has also focussed on traditional US (Hollywood) or European narrative mass media, rather than culturally-diverse or Indigenous-authored film and television. This article aims to make a contribution to both of these under-examined fields by offering a case study of the stylistic functions of Australian Aboriginal English lexis in three successful Indigenous-authored television series. The three series (Redfern Now, Cleverman and Mystery Road) are all important for the television canon and were broadcast in Australia as well as exported internationally. Using an existing corpus with dialogue from these series as repository, this article illustrates the different functions of Australian Aboriginal English lexis in its surrounding text by critically examining multiple dialogue extracts from the three narratives. Quotations from Indigenous screen creatives are interwoven with the analysis where relevant. We argue that such lexis fulfils many functions beyond characterisation and demonstrate the significance of communicating culture and identity in Indigenous-authored drama. The study has implications both for the stylistic analysis of the multiple functions of television/film dialogue and for the study of narratives that feature significant creative involvement by marginalised, subjugated, colonised, or otherwise historically excluded communities – including but not limited to Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait islander people(s) in Australia.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46171088","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-08-17DOI: 10.1177/09639470221115033
Shu Zeng
This article discusses Steinbeck’s linguistic creation of Chinese personae in his fiction, which develops from the early practice of using silence in ‘Johnny Bear’ (1938) to chronologically progressive engagement with Chinese Pidgin English (CPE) in Cannery Row (1945) and East of Eden (1952). This change is evident from the increase of CPE dialogues in his later works and best exemplified in the turn to taking non-standard English as a key concern by investing style-shifting with stylistic and thematic meaning in East of Eden. Silence and implicatures are strategically employed in ‘Johnny Bear’ to keep the narrative suspense and broach the antinarratable subject of interracial romance and illegitimate pregnancy so as not to offend the reader. Steinbeck’s later experimentation with CPE demonstrates conformity and discrepancy with sociolinguistic observations, whilst in his representation of CPE the author uses metalanguage to guide readers towards a better understanding of this language variety and a sympathetic interpretation of the Chinese characters. Existing alongside real sociolinguistic systems, the ficto-linguistic system in Steinbeck’s fiction subtly critiques the supposedly ‘correct’ language expected of ethnic groups and skilfully denounces discriminatory racial distinctions. The author’s incorporation of Chinese presence and CPE into his writings serves the grander scheme of scrutinizing American identity and society.
{"title":"The creation of Chinese personae in Steinbeck’s fiction","authors":"Shu Zeng","doi":"10.1177/09639470221115033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470221115033","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses Steinbeck’s linguistic creation of Chinese personae in his fiction, which develops from the early practice of using silence in ‘Johnny Bear’ (1938) to chronologically progressive engagement with Chinese Pidgin English (CPE) in Cannery Row (1945) and East of Eden (1952). This change is evident from the increase of CPE dialogues in his later works and best exemplified in the turn to taking non-standard English as a key concern by investing style-shifting with stylistic and thematic meaning in East of Eden. Silence and implicatures are strategically employed in ‘Johnny Bear’ to keep the narrative suspense and broach the antinarratable subject of interracial romance and illegitimate pregnancy so as not to offend the reader. Steinbeck’s later experimentation with CPE demonstrates conformity and discrepancy with sociolinguistic observations, whilst in his representation of CPE the author uses metalanguage to guide readers towards a better understanding of this language variety and a sympathetic interpretation of the Chinese characters. Existing alongside real sociolinguistic systems, the ficto-linguistic system in Steinbeck’s fiction subtly critiques the supposedly ‘correct’ language expected of ethnic groups and skilfully denounces discriminatory racial distinctions. The author’s incorporation of Chinese presence and CPE into his writings serves the grander scheme of scrutinizing American identity and society.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48090142","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-08-15DOI: 10.1177/09639470221117674
Reiko Ikeo
The use of the present tense as the primary narrative tense has become a commonly encountered phenomenon in contemporary fiction. The textual effects of the use of the present narrative tense, however, have not yet been fully explored. This paper first reviews how the use of tenses contributes to constructing narrative worlds, focusing on three facets of narrative: the relationship between the narrator and the narrated, time frames within the narrative and characters’ discourse embedded in narrative. Then, using corpus data which includes both present- and past-tense fiction, I will show that the boundaries and distinctions which are consistently taken for granted in past-tense narrative can be blurred, crossed within narratorial structures and partly expanded at a meta-textual level from written discourse to spoken discourse.
{"title":"Contemporary present-tense fiction: Crossing boundaries in narrative","authors":"Reiko Ikeo","doi":"10.1177/09639470221117674","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470221117674","url":null,"abstract":"The use of the present tense as the primary narrative tense has become a commonly encountered phenomenon in contemporary fiction. The textual effects of the use of the present narrative tense, however, have not yet been fully explored. This paper first reviews how the use of tenses contributes to constructing narrative worlds, focusing on three facets of narrative: the relationship between the narrator and the narrated, time frames within the narrative and characters’ discourse embedded in narrative. Then, using corpus data which includes both present- and past-tense fiction, I will show that the boundaries and distinctions which are consistently taken for granted in past-tense narrative can be blurred, crossed within narratorial structures and partly expanded at a meta-textual level from written discourse to spoken discourse.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48976173","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-08-02DOI: 10.1177/09639470221114718
Zhijun Zhang, Shisheng Liu
‘A Mother’ by Joyce tells of Mrs. Kearney’s effort in enhancing her daughter’s musical reputation during the Irish Revival, revolving around a conflict between Mrs. Kearney and a male-dominated group at concerts. Although some studies tend to view Mrs. Kearney as a dominant female and others take her as a victim of gender discrimination, there is no interpretation from the perspective of social minds. This article aims at using social mind theory to explore how the characters manipulate social minds against each other for their own purposes. It is found that Joyce deploys ‘covert double cognitive narrative’, a new paradigm of social minds, to propel the plot, and utilizes behaviourist narration and dialogue predominantly in rendering social minds. Therefore, this new perspective commands a panoramic view of the social minds manipulations in ‘A Mother’. Tracing the social minds this way is essential in understanding the story, shedding light on the Irish cultural paralysis of the time.
{"title":"Panoramic social minds: Social minds manipulations in ‘A Mother’","authors":"Zhijun Zhang, Shisheng Liu","doi":"10.1177/09639470221114718","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470221114718","url":null,"abstract":"‘A Mother’ by Joyce tells of Mrs. Kearney’s effort in enhancing her daughter’s musical reputation during the Irish Revival, revolving around a conflict between Mrs. Kearney and a male-dominated group at concerts. Although some studies tend to view Mrs. Kearney as a dominant female and others take her as a victim of gender discrimination, there is no interpretation from the perspective of social minds. This article aims at using social mind theory to explore how the characters manipulate social minds against each other for their own purposes. It is found that Joyce deploys ‘covert double cognitive narrative’, a new paradigm of social minds, to propel the plot, and utilizes behaviourist narration and dialogue predominantly in rendering social minds. Therefore, this new perspective commands a panoramic view of the social minds manipulations in ‘A Mother’. Tracing the social minds this way is essential in understanding the story, shedding light on the Irish cultural paralysis of the time.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48645054","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-08-01DOI: 10.1177/09639470221120450
Fransina Stradling
so-called ‘synesthetic metaphors’ (such as sweet smell and loud colour) are neither synesthetic nor metaphorical. Rather, such adjectives as sweet and loud are ‘highly supramodal descriptors that encompass multiple senses’ (p. 238). Winter uses two arguments to back up this claim. One, ‘the involved perceptual modalities are highly integrated’ (p. 96), an observation that is the logical consequence of his rejection of the five senses folk model. In other words, since the senses are not discrete modalities, it serves no purpose to talk in terms of using one domain (e.g. the gustatory domain to which sweet belongs) to talk about another domain (the olfactory domain of smell). Two, ‘crossmodal uses simply follow from word-inherent evaluative meaning’ (p. 96), by which he means that an adjective such as sweet is used to talk about smell simply for its evaluative meaning, i.e. the fact that it has positive connotations. In other words, when we use what appears to be a synesthetic metaphor such as sweet smell, we do so because sweet is a positive adjective and not because sweet belongs to a different semantic domain to smell. As Winter points out, his ‘literal analysis of synesthetic metaphors’ has ‘far-reaching conclusions for lexical semantics and conceptual metaphor theory’, not least because it ‘compels us to see the continuity of the senses as reaching all the way down into the lexical representation of individual words’ (p. 238). This is a real and welcome challenge to conceptual metaphor theory with its implicit notion of discrete ‘domains’. Winter’s book, then, is valuable not least for its methodological rigour and its theoretical innovativeness. It provides sensory linguistics with a very firm foundation that future researchers can build upon. One possible path that sensory linguists might take (a path not signalled byWinter) is to explore (as Ullmann did in his 1945 article on Keats and Byron) how poetry in particular draws on the sensory nature of language. There are scattered references inWinter’s book to the important work in cognitive poetics of Reuven Tsur, but sensory linguistics would benefit from a much more sustained and comprehensive treatment of the sensoriness of poetic language.
{"title":"Book Review: Storyworld Possible Selves","authors":"Fransina Stradling","doi":"10.1177/09639470221120450","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470221120450","url":null,"abstract":"so-called ‘synesthetic metaphors’ (such as sweet smell and loud colour) are neither synesthetic nor metaphorical. Rather, such adjectives as sweet and loud are ‘highly supramodal descriptors that encompass multiple senses’ (p. 238). Winter uses two arguments to back up this claim. One, ‘the involved perceptual modalities are highly integrated’ (p. 96), an observation that is the logical consequence of his rejection of the five senses folk model. In other words, since the senses are not discrete modalities, it serves no purpose to talk in terms of using one domain (e.g. the gustatory domain to which sweet belongs) to talk about another domain (the olfactory domain of smell). Two, ‘crossmodal uses simply follow from word-inherent evaluative meaning’ (p. 96), by which he means that an adjective such as sweet is used to talk about smell simply for its evaluative meaning, i.e. the fact that it has positive connotations. In other words, when we use what appears to be a synesthetic metaphor such as sweet smell, we do so because sweet is a positive adjective and not because sweet belongs to a different semantic domain to smell. As Winter points out, his ‘literal analysis of synesthetic metaphors’ has ‘far-reaching conclusions for lexical semantics and conceptual metaphor theory’, not least because it ‘compels us to see the continuity of the senses as reaching all the way down into the lexical representation of individual words’ (p. 238). This is a real and welcome challenge to conceptual metaphor theory with its implicit notion of discrete ‘domains’. Winter’s book, then, is valuable not least for its methodological rigour and its theoretical innovativeness. It provides sensory linguistics with a very firm foundation that future researchers can build upon. One possible path that sensory linguists might take (a path not signalled byWinter) is to explore (as Ullmann did in his 1945 article on Keats and Byron) how poetry in particular draws on the sensory nature of language. There are scattered references inWinter’s book to the important work in cognitive poetics of Reuven Tsur, but sensory linguistics would benefit from a much more sustained and comprehensive treatment of the sensoriness of poetic language.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46952637","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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