Volume 39, Issue 2

This article examines Shakespeare's dramatic secret of a “Ghost” in Hamlet. The idea of a “Ghost,” a being of uncertain existence, whether an idea or an event or the soul of a deceased person, is effectively used in this work to create a world of doubt into which Hamlet is drawn by the words of what seems to be the ghost of King Hamlet. Through Hamlet's words and behavior, Claudius is drawn into this world, which I call the world of SEEMING. It is in this world that Hamlet utters the famous phrase “To be, or not to be.” Finally, Hamlet kills his uncle without obtaining evidence of Claudius's crime and himself dies without knowing whether Claudius actually killed his father. In this circumstance, Hamlet cannot be said to have taken vengeance, which even in Elizabethan times was not allowed by law or religion; and yet vengeance is seemingly created in the audience's belief world.

This article explores the deictic functioning of metanarrative expressions in fiction. Current theoretical approaches to metanarration are reviewed, and classifying terminology revised. This critique enables the development of a more nuanced typology of metanarration, exposes the lack of linguistic analysis of the functioning of metanarrative expressions, and indicates the deictic contribution to this functioning. The role of deixis within metanarration is then further explicated. The category of discourse deixis is investigated and refined, and various subtypes of discourse deixis correlated with subtypes of metanarrative expressions. The analytical value of this approach is demonstrated through the study of discourse deixis in metanarrative extracts from Beckett's (Pan Books, 1979 [1959]) The unnameable , Federman's (Fiction Collective, 1976) Take it or leave it and Barth's (Random House, 1988 [1969]) Lost in the funhouse .

Anglo-American and Russian stylistics influenced each other substantially in the 1960s and 1970s. From the 1980s on, however, this fruitful mutual influence came to an end. The two schools started to grow apart, but despite that, they would develop almost parallel to each other, displaying many theoretical and methodological similarities. The present paper illustrates this by highlighting one such specificity – the idea of the possible reflection of one's conceptualization of the world in the use of literary language, and the possibility of reconstructing that conceptualization by means of a stylistic analysis (‘mind style’–‘kartina mira’). By comparing the Anglo-American and Russian theories on the topic, it is shown that the separately evolved conceptions are similar and even complement each other: the differences between them clarify and help solve possible theoretical and methodological gaps. Moreover, the juxtaposition of both conceptions allows us to perfect the notion of ‘mind style’ and its practical applications. A similar approach to other conceptions and tendencies in current seemingly mutually independent Anglo-American and Russian stylistics have the same potential, and may lead to a new convergence between the two schools.

Fowler's (Linguistics and the novel, Methuen, 1977) original definition of mind style emphasised consistency as a defining feature of the phenomenon, something that is (i) difficult to measure, and (ii) often missed in qualitative analyses. In this paper we investigate how a computational semantic analysis might be used to address this difficulty, with particular reference to McIntyre's (Journal of Literary Semantics 34: 21–40, 2005) analysis of the deviant mind style of the character of Miss Shepherd in Alan Bennett's play The Lady in the Van . To do this we analyse the speech of all the characters in The Lady in the Van using Wmatrix (Rayson, Matrix: A statistical method and software tool for linguistic analysis through corpus comparison, Lancaster University PhD thesis, 2003, Wmatrix: A web-based corpus processing environment, Lancaster University, 2008), to see whether it provides quantitative support for the interpretative conclusions reached by McIntyre. Wmatrix utilises the UCREL Semantic Annotation System (USAS) which has been designed to undertake the automatic semantic analysis of English. The initial tag-set of the USAS system was loosely based on McArthur's Longman Lexicon of Contemporary English (McArthur, Longman, 1981), but has since been considerably revised in the light of practical tagging problems met in the course of previous research, and now contains 232 category labels (such as medicine and medical treatment, movement, obligation and necessity , etc.). We use Wmatrix's facility for identifying key semantic domains in pursuit of our two main aims: (i) to determine whether Miss Shepherd's odd mind style is consistent, as Fowler's definition suggests it should be; and (ii) to determine the usefulness of computational semantic analysis for investigating mind style.