Volume 35, Issue 2

Lively originality, in literature and elsewhere, is conventionally associated with the avoidance of cliché and well-worn phrasing. But the relations between cliché, idiom, high-frequency use, and their contribution to literary art, are less predictable (for a discussion of the reiteration of the signifier in the visual rather than verbal medium, namely clipart images, see Dillon 2006). There seems to be no direct correlation between how often a phrase appears in the large corpora of contemporary English and how clichéd it is felt to be; and clichédness and idiomaticity seem to be more a matter of perception than of statistical prominence. Conversely, rare collocations are “striking”, but this is not sufficient for purposes of literary art. More important than a striking turn of phrase is an apt one (relative to topic, theme, co-text, cumulative aligned structure: the entire integrated design of the poem). Aptness is an aesthetic category, not a statistical one and not reducible to one, since it applies to a particular, indeed, a unique communicative moment. And the apt word or phrase may not be a novel one.

Martin Amis's novel (or novella) Time's Arrow turns back the life history of an Auschwitz doctor by beginning with his death, portrayed as awakening, and ending at the moment when he enters his mother's womb. The reversal of time has different effects on the consciousness of the protagonist and that of the narrator, although the two share the same body. The ensuing splits and mergers of personality are interpreted here in terms of the reversals of the thermodynamic and psychological time's arrows (vide the book's title). An analysis of the world of the novel couched within the framework of cognitive grammar leads one to a recognition of two narrative personas, involved in multifarious relationships with the protagonist, memory, and the flow of conceived and processing time.

This paper asks what the familiar conception of literary interpretation as socially situated and rhetorical might mean on the cognitive level. Rejecting the prescriptiveness, individualism, and use of invented examples that theorisations of reading based on so-called “cognitive linguistics” have involved, it attempts to develop Michael Billig's model of thought as argument into a theory of interpretation adequate to the complexities of actual reader discourse within one particular social context (academia). A detailed intertextual analysis is carried out to provide qualitative empirical support for this theory, showing how four critics read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness by debating its correct interpretation.

As interest in Text World Theory continues to grow, the need to test the boundaries of Text World Theory's practical capabilities is urgent if the theory is to have integrity as a cohesive explanatory and analytical tool in the study of discourse. This article discusses findings which challenge Text World Theory's account of the world-building process. Drawing on my analysis of the construction of text-world location in Canadian poetry, I argue that Werth's explanation of the role of noun phrases in the world-building process is flawed, and his distinction between world-building and function-advancing is likewise ill-conceived and at odds with the central philosophical commitments of the theory as Werth himself sets them out.

This article is intended as a new departure in the theory of the constitution and comprehension of discourse. It begins by extending the notions, familiar in the field of text linguistics, of cohesion and coherence, in such a way as to explain the kinds of necessary relations that exist amongst texts to create larger bodies of discourse that are cognitively real, in just the way that texts are cognitively real. The theoretical approach that has been adopted for this purpose is the Cognitive Discourse Analysis approach of Teun van Dijk. It depends upon the constitutive role of propositions. I go on to claim that the potential in this approach for explaining the nature of texts, their relations within broader realms of discourse, and their subjective comprehension extends to some notoriously difficult areas of research, including the nature of the so-called abstract concepts. Furthermore, it seems that the hypotheses advanced here are eminently testable. What I find especially promising in an approach based on a theory of propositions and intertextual relations is that it potentially opens up the way to a foundational theory that is universally applicable to texts of all conceivable types. For example, where literature has been conceived of as existing in opposition to other non-literary genres, and therefore requiring a branch of theory all its own, the attempt here is rather to show that texts of all types are mutually implicated in interesting ways and that identifying a separate cognitive function of ‘literariness’ is not always and everywhere the best way to understand literature. In the later pages of this article I will attempt to show how narrative genres exemplify certain of the discourse processes I have in mind, particularly how narrative (macro) propositions supply meanings that can be nominalised as abstract nouns.

Interest in the application of corpus linguistic methods in literary linguistics grows apace. One simple use of Scott's Keywords procedure (from his Wordsmith Tools text analysis package) is here reported, since it may be of interest to analysts of narrative text. ‘Automatic’ abridgement of a short story, by selecting in their original sequence just those of its sentences in which the most key keyword occurs, creates a partial but semi-coherent and ‘resonant’ text (not an orthodox summary), where mostly incoherence might have been expected. The top keyword in a short story is most often a focalized character's name (or, as rare alternative, part of the narration's standard lexical means of naming and denoting a particular character). Perhaps a story's top keyword, in its sentential contexts of use, creates a form of foregrounding, a waymarking of more noticeable and noteworthy (not necessarily the most noteworthy) sentences, asserting or reinforcing those sentences' centrality to the developing situation (action and theme).