Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar: Language and Worldview in Speculative Fiction

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Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar advances our understanding of mind style: the experience of other minds, or worldviews, through language in literature. This book is the first to set out a detailed, unified framework for the analysis of mind style using the account of language and cognition set out in cognitive grammar. Drawing on insights from cognitive linguistics, Louise Nuttall aims to explain how character and narrator minds are created linguistically, with a focus on the strange minds encountered in the genre of speculative fiction. Previous analyses of mind style are reconsidered using cognitive grammar, alongside original analyses of four novels by Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Matheson and J.G. Ballard. Responses to the texts in online forums and literary critical studies ground the analyses in the experiences of readers, and support an investigation of this effect as an embodied experience cued by the language of a text. Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar advances both stylistics and cognitive linguistics, whilst offering new insights for research in speculative fiction.

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This book proposes a new and compelling account of a central phenomenon in the reading of narrative fiction: mind style, or the experiencing of distinctive characters minds in response to patterns of linguistic choices in texts. By systematically applying insights from cognitive grammar to the language of Atwoods The Handmaids Tale, Ishiguros Never Let Me Go, Mathesons I am Legend and Ballards The Drowned World, Nuttall makes a ground-breaking contribution to cognitive poetics/stylistics, cognitive linguistics and the study of speculative fiction. -- Elena Semino, Professor of Linguistics and Verbal Art, Lancaster University, UK
Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar offers a fascinating, text-driven account of how readers experience mind styles in speculative fiction. Through a series of four exemplary case studies, which scale from syntax to lexis, and then to patterns of action chains and metaphor, Nuttall convincingly demonstrates how Cognitive Grammar can inform, enrich and extend our understanding of distinctive worldviews in these defamiliarising text worlds. * Chloe Harrison, Lecturer in Stylistics, Coventry University, UK *

Author Bio

Louise Nuttall is a Lecturer at the University of Huddersfield, UK, where she teaches linguistics and stylistics.