Volume 50, Issue 2

This article offers a critical response to the discussion in Carina Rasse and Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. article in JLS 50(1) entitled , Metaphorical Thinking in Our Literary Experiences of J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye”. My paper reconsiders how different the paradigm of cognitive linguistics, particularly in the tradition of conceptual metaphor research, is to that of discourse linguistics, especially in the hermeneutic tradition. Do the two approaches aim at irreconcilable objectives, particularly as cognitive linguistics is focussed on what happens in people’s heads and/or bodies when creating an utterance, whereas I argue that as language is social, it is about the communication of meaning. Discourse linguistics explores what it takes to make sense, to consciously interpret utterances in their contexts, as what an utterance means is how it is intertextually linked to other related utterances. In other words, the meaning of any segment of an utterance of a text, is the sum of the ways in which this segment has been paraphrased in related occurrences. In this paper, I present the two frameworks from my own, strongly biased, perspective.

Fiction has often shown that our sense of time can be affected by the spaces and things around us. In particular, the houses in which characters live can make the passing of time dilate, accelerate, even to seem to skip or stop. These interactions between place and time may represent more than metaphor or literary artifice, but rather genuine cognitive processes of embodied subjective time. This is demonstrated in an analysis of Lisa Gorton’s The Life of Houses , supplementing traditional stylistic analysis with cognitive poetics to explore an influence of the central house, the Sea House, on the young protagonist’s experience of time. Exploring the text through the fictional mental functioning of a main character offers a new way to understand The Life of Houses , and, more broadly, the cognitive approach set out in this article—one which takes into account various active and interactive influences on subjective time—may have implications for the interpretation of other works which analyse the connections between time, place, and self.

Literary stylistics, whose subject matter is literary language, straddles the disciplines of literary criticism and linguistics, as Henry Widdowson pointed out 45 years ago. Since then, developments in discourse analysis and multimodal studies have had the potential to expand the map of the interactions between different disciplines. This case study performs a traditional stylistic analysis of the poem ‘From Far, from Eve and Morning’ from A E Housman’s A Shropshire Lad but also demonstrates the potential for a multimodal perspective on stylistics by relating it to a musical analysis of Vaughan-Williams’ setting of the poem. It begins with a linguistic analysis of phonology, graphology and punctuation, lexis, phrase structure, clause structure and clausal semantics. It proceeds to a discourse analysis of pragmatics and discourse structure. And it ends by relating the linguistic and discoursal analysis to the music through music criticism. By way of conclusion, it suggests that both linguistic analysis and appreciation of musical structure and mood are useful ways into Spitzer’s philological circle, by which linguistic analysis and musical appreciation can pave the way for literary appreciation.

Explicitation is a key concept in translation studies referring to turning what is implicitly narrated in a source text into explicit narration in a target text; it has been widely studied from different aspects across language pairs and genres. However, while most previous studies investigate explicitation through a few indicators of explicitness, most of which are specific logical links and connectives, textual explicitness encompasses far beyond these. To date, little attention has been paid, especially in literary translation, to semantic explicitation, which is realized through cohesive chains in textual development. Since cohesive chains represent the development of events and characters throughout the text, it is assumed the more there are of them, the more tangible a text is in realizing its meaning within its context. This research, therefore, sets out to investigate the cohesive chains in a Chinese classic novel, Hong Lou Meng , and in its two English translations, The Dream of the Red Mansions and A Story of the Stone , with an emphasis on how the texts are manifested as narratives in the respective contexts with different readers. It has found a trend of explicitation in translation from Chinese source text to English target texts in terms of the numbers of cohesive chains and the lexical items forming the chains. It has also found differences in the distribution of different types of cohesive chains (identity chains and similarity chains), which represent distinctive patterns of realizing the context in each text. The interpretation of these different stylistic features in narrative reflects both typological differences and translators’ choices.