Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Text and Discourse

Christopher Hart is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at Lancaster University.

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.

• Introduction, Christopher HartChapter 1: Shelley’s Dominion: Subliminal and Ambient Tonal Effects Across a Literary Work, Peter StockwellChapter 2: A ‘Half-Remembered Quality’: Experiencing Disorientation and Claustrophobia in The Goldfinch, Chloe HarrisonChapter 3: Creativity and Cognition in the Discourse of National Trust Holiday Cottage Guestbooks, Joanna Gavins and Sara WhiteleyChapter 4: Metaphorical Descriptions of Pain on a Trigeminal Neuralgia Forum: Pushing the Boundaries of Cognitive Linguistics, Elena SeminoChapter 5: Simulation in Deictic Space: Scenes and Episodes in the Lord’s Prayer, Jeremy HollandChapter 6: Cultural Responses to 9/11 and the Healing Power of Songs: A Text-World-Theory Analysis of Bruce Springsteen’s "The Rising", Laura Filardo-LlamasChapter 7: A Nation Divided: Metaphors and Scenarios in Media Coverage of the 2016 British EU Referendum, Veronika Koller and Josie RyanChapter 8: ‘That’s Just What We Hear on Telly all the Time, Isn’t It?’ Political Discourse and the Cognitive Linguistic Ethnography of Critical Reception, Sam BrowseChapter 9: Spatial Properties of ACTION Verb Semantics: Experimental Evidence for Image Schema Orientation in Transitive vs. Reciprocal Verbs and Its Implications for Ideology, Christopher Hart