Stylistics and Social Cognition

Front Cover
This volume of articles comprises papers from the 25th annual conference of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA), which was held at the University of Huddersfield, England, in July 2005. The theme of the conference was 'Stylistics and Social Cognition', and as usual at a PALA conference, this theme was interpreted very widely by the participants, as the reader of this book will no doubt conclude.
At the heart of this volume, there is something of a reaction against the cognitive developments in stylistics, which might be seen as being in danger of privileging the individual interpretation of literature over something more social. The concern is to consider whether there is a more collective approach that could be taken to the meaning of text, and whether recent insights from cognitive stylistics could work with this idea of collectivity to define something we might call 'commonality' of meaning in texts.
Stylistics and Social Cognition will be of interest to those working in stylistics and other text-analytic fields such as critical discourse analysis and those concerned with notions of interpretation, collective meaning and human communication.

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Contents

Between Protocognitivism and Poststructuralism
1
The SocioPsychology of Interpretive Communities and a CognitiveSemiotic Model for Analysis
19
Using Relevance Theory and an Alternative Account
39
The Role of Metaphors in the Construction of a New Text World
57
The Ideological Function of Conventional and Created Oppositions in the Construction of Ingroups and Outgroups in News
71
Uncovering Archetypal Narrative in Real Home Magazine Features
101
Social Value and Expressive Potential
115
Males and Females Doing Gender in Personal Narratives about Trouble
125
Embedded Meaning of Free Verse Types With an Example from the Introduction of T S Eliots AshWednesday in Swedish
153
Poetic Deviation and CrossCultural Cognition
165
The Unspoken in Contemporary American Love Poetry
181
Characteristics of Bestsellers
205
Lexical Bundles as Indicators of Linguistic Choices and Sociocultural Traces1
217
Naughty or Nice? Empirical Studies of Literature in the Classroom
237
Bibliography
255
Index
275

Pamela and the Gendered Construction of Narrative Voice in the EighteenthCentury British Novel
141

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Page 217 - IT was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest...
Page 115 - In point of fact, word is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant. As word, it is precisely the product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener, addresser and addressee. Each and every word expresses the 'one
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Page 9 - A word, like any other sign, gets whatever meaning it has through belonging to a recurrent group of events, which may be called its context. Thus a word's context, in this sense, is a certain recurrent pattern of past groups of events, and to say that its meaning depends upon its context would be to point to the process by which it has acquired its meaning.
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