The Language of Stories
A Cognitive Approach

This book describes the conceptual and linguistic underpinnings of narrative interpretation.

Barbara Dancygier (Author)

9781107005822, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 October 2011

242 pages, 20 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.52 kg

'What I appreciated most in The Language of Stories [was] Dancygier's attention to small lexical and grammatical textual choices and her rigorous attempt to follow the effect of these details through to the macro-level of meaning construction.' Elke D'hoker, English Text Construction

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.

1. Language and literary narratives
2. Blending, narrative spaces, and the emergent story
3. Stories and their tellers
4. Viewpoint: representation and compression
5. Referential expressions and narrative spaces
6. Fictional minds and embodiment in drama and fiction
7. Spoken discourse and thought in literary discourse
8. Stories in the mind.

Subject Areas: Cognition & cognitive psychology [JMR], Literary studies: general [DSB], Semantics, discourse analysis, etc [CFG], Historical & comparative linguistics [CFF]