The Language of Stories: A Cognitive Approach

How do we read stories? How do they engage our minds and create meaning? Are they a mental construct, a linguistic one or a cultural one? What is the difference between real stories and fictional ones? This book addresses such questions by describing the conceptual and linguistic underpinnings of narrative interpretation. Barbara Dancygier discusses literary texts as linguistic artifacts, describing the processes which drive the emergence of literary meaning. If a text means something to someone, she argues, there have to be linguistic phenomena that make it possible. Drawing on blending theory and construction grammar, the book focuses its linguistic lens on the concepts of the narrator and the story, and defines narrative viewpoint in a new way. The examples come from a wide spectrum of texts, primarily novels and drama, by authors such as William Shakespeare, Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, Dave Eggers, Jan Potocki and Mikhail Bulgakov.

Bara Dancygier is Professor in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her publications include Conditionals and. Prediction (Cambridge, 1998) and Mental Spaces in Grammar (with Eve Sweetser, Cambridge, 2005).

List of figures	p. ix
Acknowledgements	p. x
Introduction	p. 1
Language and literary narratives	p. 4
Where does narrative meaning come from?	p. 6
Literary analysis and linguistic analysis	p. 8
Literature, language, and human nature	p. 11
Literary texts and communication	p. 16
Why is fiction special?	p. 21
Narrative and grounding	p. 23
Approaching narratives	p. 29
Blending, narrative spaces, and the emergent story	p. 31
Applying blending to fictional narratives	p. 32
Narrative spaces as mental spaces	p. 35
Narrative spaces - an example	p. 40
Emergent story	p. 53
Stories and their tellers	p. 58
Narrators, narrative spaces, and viewpoint	p. 60
Types of teller and epistemic viewpoint	p. 68
Second-person narratives	p. 76
The teller, the author, and the character	p. 79
Multiple tellers	p. 80
Narrative space embedding	p. 84
Narrative viewpoint and narrative spaces	p. 85
Viewpoint: representation and compression	p. 86
Viewpoint and representation	p. 87
Viewpoint compression	p. 91
Decompression for viewpoint	p. 96
Fictive vision, causation, and change	p. 100
The micro level, the macro levei, and viewpoint compression	p. 102
Speech, thought, and multiple leveis of representation	p. 108
Narrative thought and intersubjectivity	p. 112
Referential expressions and narrative spaces	p. 117
Compression, decompression, and cross-space mappings	p. 118
Proper names, frame metonymy, and the status of a character	p. 119
Role-value mappings as cross-space connectors	p. 121
Common nouns	p. 128
Personal pronouns, viewpoint, and the narrator	p. 129
Deictic / and the construal of subjectivity	p. 136
Fictional minds and embodiment in drama and fiction	p. 139
Deictic ground in literary discourse	p. 139
Mental spaces, physical spaces, and dramatic narratives	p. 141
Materiality of the stage and fictional minds	p. 146
From dramatic narratives to novelistic narratives	p. 164
Fictional minds, bodies, and brains	p. 168
Speech and thought in the narrative	p. 171
Types of discourse spaces in the narrative	p. 172
Speaking for thinking	p. 174
Levels of embedding in though! representation	p. 178
Viewpoint compression and constructional compositionality	p. 183
Stories in the mind	p. 195
The linguistics of literature	p. 195
The storyworld reality	p. 200
Blending and narrative analysis	p. 201
A bridge to the truth	p. 203
Notes to the text	p. 205
References	p. 210
Literary works cited	p. 223
Index	p. 225
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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The Language of Stories: A Cognitive Approach

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