Abstract
Abstract This article establishes the theoretical bases for a more direct and detailed exploration of fictional minds in cognitive stylistics. This discipline usually analyzes narrative discourse in terms of how readers process language and conceptualize narrative meaning, treating literary language more or less explicitly as a window into readers’ mental experiences. However, it is also possible to treat literary language as a window into characters’ minds, which, in spite of their obvious fictionality, could enhance the potential for cognitive linguistic analysis to inform our understanding of the human mind and consciousness more generally. This article explores the nature of linguistic meaning in different speech and thought presentation techniques primarily through the lens of Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar, ultimately prioritizing the representational semantics of Free Indirect Thought. It proposes a more precise understanding of the concept of ‘conceptualizer’ which would validate a type of mind style analysis that is more narrowly focused on illuminating the underlying mental activity of fictional characters instead of readers. It demonstrates this type of focus with a brief analysis of a passage from Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend.
Highlights
This article establishes the theoretical bases for a more direct and detailed exploration of fictional minds in cognitive stylistics
2 Grounding and character conceptualization. While it is this character-oriented approach that is advocated in the present article, all of the analytical approaches described above are justifiable if we examine the nature of semantics in Cognitive Grammar
The following section will use that understanding of Free Indirect Thought (FIT), together with that of characters’ quoted discourse discussed above, as a basis for subdividing the notion of ‘conceptualizer’ in Cognitive Grammar (CG) into distinct types. This will validate the cognitive linguistic analysis of meaning in relation to the underlying mental activity of various individuals who are involved in discourse in different ways, including fictional characters whose minds are merely represented by the language
Summary
Cognitive linguistics provides the best toolkit for mining the meaning of literary language for a deeper understanding of how characters’ minds work. In the application of cognitive linguistics to the analysis of literary discourse in cognitive stylistics, most scholarship has focused on analyzing meaning in terms of readers’ mental activity (e.g. Browse 2018; Culpepper 2001; Emmott 2001; Giovanelli 2013; Giovanelli & Harrison 2018; Harrison et al 2014; Harrison 2017; Nuttall 2018, 2019a, 2019b; Stockwell 2009, 2014). This is in keeping with a dominant trend in broader stylistics towards reader-response criticism. Even though character minds are obviously linguistic constructs that have no real existence outside of readers’ and authors’ imaginary experience, this last type of analysis treats fictional minds as if they have an underlying depth of mental experience and cognitive processing that is as relevant for linguistic meaning as that of the real-life language producers and receivers
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