Volume 45, Issue 2 -

Despite renewed attention to Katherine Mansfield’s writing in recent years, her work continues to be read largely for “its political and emotional sensibilities and so seldom... for the controlled effects of stylistic detail” (New 1999. Reading Mansfield and metaphors of form . McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP: viii). In this article we consider her story “Bliss” in relation to how Mansfield choreographs the interplay between the inner and outer worlds of the central character and the consequences of her textual crafting of this interplay for a reading of the theme of Mansfield’s story. We draw largely on what is now considered “classical” stylistics, that is, stylistics informed by a social-semiotic linguistics (e. g. Butt 1983. Semantic Drift in Verbal Art. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics , 6 1, 34–48; Halliday 2002. Linguistic Studies of Text and Discourse. Volume 2 in the Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday . London and New York: Continuum; Hasan 1985. Linguistics, Language and Verbal Art . Geelong, VIC: Deakin University Press; Hasan 1996a. On Teaching Literature Across Cultural Differences. In J. James Ed., The Language-Culture Connection pp. 34–63. Singapore: SEAMEO; Leech and Short 2007. Style in Fiction . 2nd Edition . London. Longman; Semino and Short 2004. Corpus Stylistics: Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing . London: Routledge; Sotirova 2013. Consciousness in Modernist Fiction: A Stylistic Study . Palgrave Macmillan; Toolan 2001. Narrative: A critical linguistic introduction . Second Edition. Routledge; Toolan 2007. Language. In D. Herman Ed., The Cambridge companion to narrative pp. 231–244. Cambridge University Press;). Given the extensive variety of contributions to “post-classical” or “cognitive narratology” e. g. (Herman 2007. Introduction. In D. Herman (ed.), The Cambridge companion to narrative . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press; McHale 2014. Speech Representation. In P. Hühn, J. C. Meister, J. Pier, & W. Schmid Eds., living handbook of narratology . Hamburg: Hamburg University. Retrieved from http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/; Palmer 2004. Fictional minds . University of Nebraska Press) we briefly comment on why we have not taken this direction in our analysis.

Research on image schemas in language and cognition ( containment , path , blockage , etc.) is largely based on de-contextualized linguistic expressions. This results in a view of image schemas as somehow detached from experience, constituting source domains for fixed conceptual projections from the concrete to the abstract. By showcasing creative examples of the poetics of containment throughout the long diachrony of Greek poetry, this article proposes that image schemas reflect the early attentional preferences of the human mind. These central features of image schemas are further selected for their suitability to create ad-hoc, non-perceptual meanings. Templates for conceptual integration involving image schemas also offer coherent patterns of variation, which opportunistically exploit arising connections with culture, context, and goals. Understanding the role of image schemas in meaning construction and verbal art requires the study of both the entrenched patterns and the know-how associated to their usage.

The sense of taste has been considered an “inferior” sense for a long time, both in philosophical and scientific fields of investigation (Cavalieri 2011. Gusto: l‘intelligenza del palato . Bari: GLF editori Laterza). However, the recent growing interest in Cognitive Science has driven scholars to a reconsideration of the role of taste in human cognition. This paper intends to investigate such a role in a corpus of five Shakespearean plays. To do so, I conducted an analysis by looking at the occurrences of seven taste terms. The research aims at exploring the metaphorical occurrences of the lexicon of taste, i.e. concordances in which a taste word does not describe food or an actual taste sensation. I propose an idealised cognitive model to organise such occurrences that involves a central mapping from which others derive, in keeping with Kövecses (2010. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press). Results are consistent in showing the role of taste in the motivation of metaphorical expression in Shakespeare’s plays.

Deploying a cognitive grammar perspective, this paper reads Gustav Hasford’s war narrative, The Short-Timers , as displaying the way attentional windowing is reflected in the language. We have taken the methodological decision of becoming cognitively sensitized to the linguistic texture of traumatically loaded episodes, with the aim of looking at the specific linguistic choices that the producer of literary language has made, and the role played by such linguistic choices in cueing the reader’s attention toward these event frames. Specifically, we demonstrate that confluence of windowing and nesting of attention with theories of conceptual metaphor, schema, and force dynamics can yield a fuller cognitive grammatical account of the foregrounded event frames. It is observed that allocation of salience to such event frames is greatly dependent on phraseology that has a high density of metaphoric constructions.