Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar: Language and Worldview in Speculative Fiction 9781350010536, 9781350010567, 9781350010543

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Permissions
1. Introduction
1.1 The topic of this book
1.2 A cognitive stylistic approach to mind style
1.3 'Real' readers
1.4 Speculative fiction
1.5 The structure of this book
2. Mind style
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Mind style and systemic-functional grammar
2.3 Mind style and point of view
2.4 Mind style and deviation
2.5 Cognitive approaches to fictional minds
2.6 Experiences of mind style
2.7 Conclusion
3. Cognitive grammar
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Cognitive linguistics
3.3 Linguistic units
3.4 Construal
3.5 Simulation
3.6 Discourse
3.7 Cognitive grammar and systemic-functional grammar
3.8 Text world theory and cognitive grammar
3.9 Conclusion
4. Syntax and thought
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Stream of consciousness
4.3 Structuring reality in cognitive grammar
4.4 Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale
4.5 World construal in The Handmaid's Tale
4.6 Attributing a mind style
4.7 Positioning the reader
4.8 Conclusion
5. Lexis and knowledge
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Under/over-lexicalization
5.3 Character and reader knowledge in cognitive grammar
5.4 Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go
5.5 Puzzle solving in Never Let Me Go
5.6 Burying and mind style
5.7 Specificity and humanness
5.8 Conclusion
6. Transitivity and worldview
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Transitivity effects
6.3 Action and mind attribution in cognitive grammar
6.4 Richard Matheson's I Am Legend
6.5 Thought representation in I Am Legend
6.6 Action chains and agency
6.7 Group participants and group minds
6.8 Perspective and mind style
6.9 Conclusion
7. Metaphor and mind
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Conventional and idiosyncratic metaphors
7.3 Metaphor and simulation in cognitive grammar
7.4 J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World
7.5 Figurative language in The Drowned World
7.6 Novel similes and construal
7.7 Resisting a mind style
7.8 Conclusion
8. Conclusion
8.1 A cognitive grammar of mind style
8.2 What stylistics can do for cognitive grammar
8.3 Strange minds in strange worlds
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

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Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar

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Advances in Stylistics Series Editors Dan McIntyre, University of Huddersfield, UK Louise Nuttall, University of Huddersfield, UK Editorial Board Beatrix Busse, University of Berne, Switzerland Szilvia Csábi, Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary Monika Fludernik, University of Freiburg, Germany Lesley Jeffries, University of Huddersfield, UK Jean Boase-Beier, University of East Anglia, UK Peter Verdonk, University of Amsterdam (Emeritus), The Netherlands Larry Stewart, College of Wooster, USA Manuel Jobert, Jean Moulin University, Lyon 3, France Other titles in the series Corpus Stylistics in Principles and Practice Yufang Ho Chick Lit: The Stylistics of Cappuccino Fiction Rocío Montoro D. H. Lawrence and Narrative Viewpoint Violeta Sotirova Discourse of Italian Cinema and Beyond Roberta Piazza Oppositions and Ideology in News Discourse Matt Davies Opposition in Discourse Lesley Jeffries Pedagogical Stylistics Michael Burke, Szilvia Csábi, Lara Week and Judit Zerkowitz Sylvia Plath and the Language of Affective States Zsófia Demjén Style in the Renaissance Patricia Canning Stylistics and Shakespeare’s Language Mireille Ravassat Text World Theory and Keats’ Poetry Marcello Giovanelli The Stylistics of Poetry Peter Verdonk World Building in Spanish and English Spoken Narratives Jane Lugea

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Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar Language and Worldview in Speculative Fiction Louise Nuttall

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Louise Nuttall, 2018 Louise Nuttall has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-1053-6 PB: 978-1-3501-5522-0 ePDF: 978-1-3500-1054-3 eBook: 978-1-3500-1055-0 Series: Bloomsbury Advances in Stylistics Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Permissions 1

2

3

viii ix x

Introduction

1

1.1 The topic of this book

1

1.2 A cognitive stylistic approach to mind style

3

1.3 ‘Real’ readers

6

1.4 Speculative fiction

8

1.5 The structure of this book

10

Mind style

13

2.1 Introduction

13

2.2 Mind style and systemic-functional grammar

13

2.3 Mind style and point of view

16

2.4 Mind style and deviation

18

2.5 Cognitive approaches to fictional minds

23

2.6 Experiences of mind style

27

2.7 Conclusion

31

Cognitive grammar

33

3.1 Introduction

33

3.2 Cognitive linguistics

33

3.3 Linguistic units

35

3.4 Construal

37

3.5 Simulation

48

3.6 Discourse

49

3.7 Cognitive grammar and systemic-functional grammar

52

3.8 Text world theory and cognitive grammar

54

3.9 Conclusion

59

vi

vi 4

5

6

7

Contents Syntax and thought

61

4.1 Introduction

61

4.2 Stream of consciousness

61

4.3 Structuring reality in cognitive grammar

62

4.4 Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

66

4.5 World construal in The Handmaid’s Tale

71

4.6 Attributing a mind style

80

4.7 Positioning the reader

84

4.8 Conclusion

86

Lexis and knowledge

89

5.1 Introduction

89

5.2 Under/over-lexicalization

89

5.3 Character and reader knowledge in cognitive grammar

93

5.4 Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

97

5.5 Puzzle solving in Never Let Me Go

102

5.6 Burying and mind style

105

5.7 Specificity and humanness

112

5.8 Conclusion

116

Transitivity and worldview

119

6.1 Introduction

119

6.2 Transitivity effects

119

6.3 Action and mind attribution in cognitive grammar

122

6.4 Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend

128

6.5 Thought representation in I Am Legend

133

6.6 Action chains and agency

136

6.7 Group participants and group minds

143

6.8 Perspective and mind style

147

6.9 Conclusion

150

Metaphor and mind

153

7.1 Introduction

153

7.2 Conventional and idiosyncratic metaphors

153

7.3 Metaphor and simulation in cognitive grammar

155

7.4 J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World

160

7.5 Figurative language in The Drowned World

164

vii

Contents

8

vii

7.6 Novel similes and construal

170

7.7 Resisting a mind style

174

7.8 Conclusion

176

Conclusion

177

8.1 A cognitive grammar of mind style

177

8.2 What stylistics can do for cognitive grammar

179

8.3 Strange minds in strange worlds

180

Notes

183

References

186

Index

211

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Figures 3.1

The construal configuration

38

3.2

Grammatical classes and their profiles

40

3.3

Sequential and summary scanning

43

3.4

A reference point relationship

44

3.5

An action chain

45

3.6

Objective and subjective construal

47

3.7

The current discourse space

50

3.8

Narrative construal configuration

57

3.9

Distributed attention across multiple conceptualizers

59

4.1

A cline of construals

81

5.1

Dominion tracing through texts

94

6.1

Multiple conceptualizers in free indirect discourse

150

7.1

Focusing of domains for a metaphorical expression

156

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Acknowledgements This book is based on my doctoral research, which was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. A big thank you goes to my supervisor, Peter Stockwell at the University of Nottingham, for his encouragement and guidance during the three years in which much of this research initially took place, and to my examiners, Elena Semino and Michaela Mahlberg, for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this book. I am also very grateful to all my colleagues in Linguistics and Modern Languages at the University of Huddersfield for their continued support throughout the writing process. Special thanks also go to fellow researchers and friends, Chloe Harrison, Arwa Hasan and Lizzie Stewart-Shaw, who have spurred me on in all sorts of ways over the years, and especially to Darren Blake, who continues to do so on a daily basis. Finally, a special mention goes to Keith, our dog, for keeping my feet warm throughout.

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Permissions Excerpts from the four novels analysed at length in this book were used with permission from the following sources: Excerpts from The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Copyright © 1985 by O. W. Toad, Ltd. Published by Jonathon Cape. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Emblem/McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited © 1986. Excerpts from Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Published by Faber, 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Kazuo Ishiguro. Used by permission of Alfred A.  Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN. Excerpts from I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. Copyright © 1954 by Richard Matheson. Reprinted by permission of Abner Stein. All rights reserved. Excerpts from The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard. Copyright © J.G. Ballard 1962. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited. An earlier version of some material in Chapter 4 is found in L. Nuttall (2014) ‘Constructing a text-world for The Handmaid’s Tale’, Harrison, C., Nuttall, L., Stockwell, P. and Yuan, W. (eds) Cognitive Grammar in Literature, John Benjamins. Material in Chapter 6 drawn from L. Nuttall (2015) ‘Attributing minds to vampires in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend’, Language and Literature 24(1): 23–39, by permission of the publishers, SAGE.

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Introduction

1.1 The topic of this book When we read narrative fiction, we are often invited to experience minds different to our own. The impact of this experience is one of the reasons why we enjoy and value literary texts. A text that recently succeeded in having such impact on me, and which illustrates the kind of reading experiences examined in this book, is Michael Faber’s novel Under the Skin (2000). In the opening paragraphs, readers are introduced to the perspective of Isserley, a woman with a particular interest in hitch-hikers: Isserley always drove straight past a hitch-hiker when she first saw him, to give herself time to size him up. She was looking for big muscles: a hunk on legs. Puny, scrawny specimens were no use to her. At first glance, though, it could be surprisingly difficult to tell the difference. You’d think a lone hitcher on a country road would stand out a mile, like a distant monument or a grain silo; you’d think you would be able to appraise him calmly as you drove, undress him and turn him over in your mind well in advance. But Isserley had found it didn’t happen that way. (Faber 2000: 1)

Isserley’s view of male hitch-hikers as ‘specimens’ and calculated attempts to ‘appraise’ each one, ‘turn him over’ and ‘size him up’ may strike readers in this opening and invite inferences as to her intentions and personality – perhaps as a woman who seeks hitchhikers as sexual partners. As the text continues, repeated references to the bodies of the hitch-hikers – ‘his body had been so good – so excellent – so perfect’ (p. 3); ‘glimpse of his buttocks, or his thighs, or maybe how well-muscled his shoulders were’ (p. 4) – support this inferred sexual interest. Simultaneously, however, other descriptions lend Isserley’s account a cold, almost scientific perspective – ‘She’d look beyond the road’s edge, at the fields or the undergrowth, in case he was hidden in there somewhere, urinating. (They were prone to do that.)’ (p. 3); ‘a fleshy biped with its arm extended’ (p. 3); ‘a male in prime condition’ (p. 4). Such descriptions in the opening pages of the novel contribute to a sense of strangeness or distinctiveness in relation to this character’s viewpoint. In my reading, I was left wondering if the distinctiveness I detected was the result of something unusual about the character, or simply my personal response to such an objectifying perspective.

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2

Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar

Later in the novel, we learn that there is definitely something unusual about this character. Isserley, as it turns out, is a member of an alien species of quadrupeds who has been surgically altered to resemble a human being. She is employed to drive around the Scottish Highlands, selecting, drugging and transporting well-built hitch-hikers to be farmed for meat, a delicacy on her home planet. By the scientific estimations of her species, human beings or ‘vodsels’ (p. 146) are lesser in consciousness than sheep, not to mention grotesque to look at. Like Gulliver’s view of the Yahoos in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Isserley’s view of the men she selects to be killed invites an experience of estrangement in readers, or a new, unsettling perspective on humanity. For me, the novel’s graphic depictions of the hitch-hikers’ chemical preparation in conditions resembling factory farming prompted a questioning of my omnivorous eating habits and the assumptions on which they are based. This book investigates the way in which experiences such as these are achieved through language. It explores the linguistic representation and reader experience of consciousness in narrative from a stylistic perspective. In stylistics, the linguistic projection of distinctive minds in prose fiction, or mind style, has been the subject of significant and ongoing research. Since it was coined by Fowler in 1977, the concept of ‘mind style’ has been applied to a wide range of texts and genres, and its analysis continually enriched through developments in stylistics and linguistics more broadly. One significant development is the emergence of a cognitive stylistic approach (e.g. Black 1993; Bockting 1994; Semino and Swindlehurst 1996; Semino 2002; Stockwell 2009). Here analysts draw on research into real-world minds in the cognitive sciences to describe the fictional minds of characters, narrators or implied authors represented in narrative. Cognitive stylistic analyses of mind style, however, have so far largely applied cognitive semantic or psychological theories of cognitive structure and processing, and have only just begun to draw upon the approaches to grammar set out in cognitive linguistics. This book proposes a step forward in the study of mind style through application of the cognitive linguistic theory of cognitive grammar (Langacker 1987, 1991, 2008, 2009). This framework’s detailed account of the relationship between language and mind, I argue, lends new specificity to our analysis of this textual effect, and enriches our understanding of its reader experience. While I argue in this book that this analytical framework can be usefully applied to any kind of text, here I focus my analysis on a particular kind of mind style. As the textual basis of this study, I  examine the strange minds and worlds encountered in the genre of speculative fiction. Typical of this genre, the four texts that are the focus of my analyses feature characters that represent a speculative or alternative version of ourselves, in an imagined future or parallel version of reality. These characters include:  ‘Offred’, a female slave in the future theocracy of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985); ‘Kathy H’, a human clone in the alternative England of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005); ‘Robert Neville’, the sole survivor of a global vampire pandemic in the apocalyptic America of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954); and finally ‘Dr. Richard Kerans’, a member of a diminishing human race in the environmental catastrophe of J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962). The example that opened this section, from Under the Skin, featured a nonhuman mind and is therefore slightly different to these speculative selves. However, the experience of a

3

Introduction

3

new perspective on the human condition that it exemplifies is common to the texts I analyse. For narratologist Uri Margolin (2003), the different kinds of minds presented in fiction – and, in particular, those that are unusual, deviant or strange – contribute significantly to our understanding of ourselves and others: The wide array of kinds and types of mental functioning displayed in narrative fiction enriches our store of conceivable models of human experientiality, suggests various views about its underlying features and regularities, and enlarges, through example rather than theory, our sense of what it may mean to be human. (Margolin 2003: 285)

Through its concern with other worlds, and their physical, social and psychological consequences for human beings, speculative fiction provides a particularly rich source of such ‘conceivable models’. Building on Margolin’s argument, the presentation of these models through ‘example’ – as part of an empathetic engagement with a character viewpoint – may challenge readers to question the ethics of such worlds, whether relating to the killing of animals for food, scientific developments in cloning or contributions to climate change. The ethical questioning invited in this way may bear similarities to that possible through ‘theory’, such as reading a scientific journal article or a newspaper report, and may even, in some cases, exceed it. This book argues that it is through an effective use of language, or mind style, that such narratives invite readers to reflect upon their own minds, their own world and the nature of human experience.

1.2 A cognitive stylistic approach to mind style This book applies cognitive grammar to the character minds linguistically presented in fictional narratives. What sets apart this approach is its explicit attention to the reader minds in which this language is processed and experienced. In setting out a context for this work in stylistics, it is useful to look first at a classic example of mind style. The following, much-discussed extract is from William Golding’s 1955 novel The Inheritors: The bushes twitched again. Lok steadied by the tree and gazed. A head and chest faced him, half-hidden. There were white bone things behind the leaves and hair. The man had white bone things above his eyes and under the mouth so that his face was longer than a face should be. The man turned sideways in the bushes and looked at Lok along his shoulder. A stick rose upright and there was a lump of bone in the middle. Lok peered at the stick and the lump of bone and the small eyes in the bone things over the face. Suddenly Lok understood that the man was holding the stick out to him but neither he nor Lok could reach across the river. He would have laughed if it were not for the echo of the screaming in his head. The stick began to grow shorter at both ends. Then it shot out to full length again. The dead tree by Lok’s ear acquired a voice. ‘Clop!’ His ears twitched and he turned to the tree. (p. 106)

4

4

Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar

Here, Lok, a Neanderthal man, watches uncomprehendingly as a member of a more advanced tribe draws a bow and shoots an arrow at him. Stylistic analyses of this extract, first as part of the famous analysis of the novel by Halliday (1971), and later by Fowler (1977), Black (1993), Simpson (1993) and Hoover (1999) among others, have identified patterns in the language which convey the distinctive cognitive abilities or worldview of this character and the primitive version of mankind that he represents. Applying concepts from his own theory of systemic-functional grammar, Halliday (1971) observed that while there is plenty of action in this scene, there is a lack of transitive clauses representing this action (i.e. containing verbs with direct objects), and very few with human subjects. So, for example, instead of reading that ‘The man rustled the bushes’, we see ‘The bushes twitched again’ in the opening line, and instead of a description of an enemy drawing a bow, we read, ‘The stick began to grow shorter at both ends.’ Where a human being is the subject, he tends to be subject of an intransitive clause, for example, ‘Lok steadied by the tree and gazed,’ and/ or represented by a body part as opposed to a whole being, ‘His ears twitched.’ Such patterns in the choice of transitivity structures in the first part of the novel are said by Halliday to reflect a limited understanding of causation and agency, or the ability of human beings to act upon and influence their surroundings, within this character’s perspective. In addition to transitivity, other linguistic choices contribute to an underlexicalization (Fowler 1986) of basic concepts here:  for example, the use of general nouns – ‘white bone things’ – in place of more specific vocabulary (Simpson 1993); and the use of metaphors to describe experiences such as the sound of an arrow hitting a tree  – ‘The dead tree by Lok’s ear acquired a voice’ (Black 1993). Altogether, it is argued, these linguistic patterns contribute to a sense of this Neanderthal character’s distinctive – and in some ways limited – understanding of the world around him. For Fowler (1986:  151), Halliday’s analysis is ‘essential reading’ for the study of mind style, or the effect whereby ‘cumulatively, consistent structural options, agreeing in cutting the presented world to one pattern or another, give rise to an impression of a world-view’ (Fowler 1977: 76, my emphasis). This example therefore seems a sensible place to begin this book’s discussion of mind style, and I  refer back to it in later chapters. Moreover, Halliday’s article is held up as a ‘blueprint of stylistics which seeks to uncover patterns of meaning through the systematic analysis of linguistic structure’ (Simpson 1993: 101–2) and as one of the first to demonstrate the effectiveness of doing so using concepts from systemic-functional grammar (Halliday 1971, 1973, 1978, 1994), as opposed to the transformational-generative grammar (Chomsky 1957) seen in stylistic work of the time (e.g. Thorne 1970; Ohmann 1971). In this respect, it also provides useful background for the stylistic application of cognitive grammar that forms the basis of my approach. Significantly for this study, Halliday’s analysis has been subject to criticism. In his famous attack on stylistics, Stanley Fish (1980) identified Halliday’s analysis (among others) as reflecting an arbitrary leap from a description of linguistic features to an attribution of meaning or interpretation, and criticized its alleged claims that ‘syntactic preferences correlate with habits of meaning’ (Fish 1980: 82). While outdated in aspects of its portrayal of stylistics, Fish’s critique raised important questions with regard to the relationship between form and effect. The basic issue, for our purposes here, is exactly how do such

5

Introduction

5

formal choices give rise to the impression of a mind style in readers (cf. Fowler 1977), and how do we know? Indeed, how can we be certain that our linguistic analysis is not simply a positivistic confirmation of the ‘impression’ that we had to begin with? One response to this issue can be seen in the development of a cognitive stylistic approach (see Toolan 1990; Simpson 1993; Hoover 1999 for other responses to Fish’s criticisms). Through the application of research in cognitive psychology, linguistics and neuroscience, cognitive stylistics provides ‘more systematic and explicit accounts of the relationship between texts on one hand and responses and interpretations on the other’ (Semino and Culpeper 2002: ix). In the case of The Inheritors, for example, application of research into the mental processing of metaphor and simile in cognitive semantics has specified the contribution of figurative language to the interpretation of this character’s mind style (Black 1993). In fact, as I shall argue in this book, stylistic discussions of effects such as mind style have long made interpretative statements which suggest, or assume, a specific cognitive effect of linguistic patterns on readers; the effects of transitivity for impressions of agency are a good example. By drawing on research in other cognitive disciplines, cognitive stylistics makes many of the same arguments as the stylistic research that came before it, but does so transparently and refutably, citing the available evidence, or lack of, where this is the case. The cognitive stylistic approach adopted here applies concepts from the cognitive linguistic framework of cognitive grammar (Langacker 1987, 1991, 2008). Langacker’s cognitive grammar sets out to provide a unifying theory of all aspects of language in terms of underlying cognitive structures and processes. This ambitious theory offers a detailed framework for a systematic analysis of mind style, which includes a reconsideration of the cumulative effects of linguistic choices such as transitivity, vocabulary and metaphor, and an explicit delineation of the wider cognitive mechanisms that such forms reflect and manipulate. In other words, it enriches our account of the impression resulting from linguistic patterns in texts, or our understanding of mind style as a multifaceted reader experience. Furthermore, as will be demonstrated in the course of this book, application of this framework offers a way of tackling bigger theoretical questions and practical issues surrounding this concept, including the deviation involved in its recognition and the interpretative distinctions that distinguish it from overlapping concepts such as style and ideology (Semino 2002, 2007; McIntyre 2005). This application of cognitive grammar fits with the essentially progressive nature of stylistics or its ongoing reassessment of the theories and frameworks upon which it bases its analyses (Stockwell and Whiteley 2014: 4). As mentioned previously, this progressive nature was seen in the widespread replacement of transformationalgenerative grammar with systemic functional grammar as the basis for stylistic analysis during the 1970s. Recent work in cognitive stylistics has suggested that cognitive grammar provides an effective framework for the analysis of discourse, which develops concepts in systemic-functional grammar in cognitive terms (Stockwell 2002, 2009, 2010; Harrison et al. 2014; Harrison 2017). Such researchers also note overlaps or points of contact between cognitive grammar and another established discourse framework in cognitive stylistics – text world theory (Werth 1999; Gavins 2007). Building upon such proposals, this book compares the benefits of these three frameworks for the development of a particular stylistic concept.

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Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar

Within cognitive stylistics, an approach using cognitive grammar can be seen to fall into a subcategory of approaches concerned with ‘micro-level’ analysis, as opposed to more schematic, macro- or world-level analysis (Stockwell 2009: 6). Researchers in cognitive stylistics have observed an imbalance towards the latter (Yuan 2010; Gavins and Stockwell 2012; Browse 2014). One reason for this is that cognitive stylistics has tended to draw upon cognitive psychological accounts such as schema theory (Bartlett 1932; Schank and Abelson 1977) and cognitive semantic frameworks such as conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff and Turner 1989), mental spaces theory (Fauconnier 1994, 1997) and conceptual integration theory (Fauconnier and Turner 2002), whose primary focus is ‘backstage cognition’ (Fauconnier 1999: 96), or the conceptual structures and mechanisms prompted by language, as opposed to language itself. Within both cognitive stylistics and cognitive linguistics, calls have been made for attention to the role of specific linguistic structures and ‘the complexity and sophistication with which they afford such prompts’ (Evans 2009a: 53). Through their prominent linguistic component, frameworks such as cognitive grammar provide a basis for an approach that has ‘a stylistic analysis embedded rather than “bolted on” to a schematic, idealised, purely psychological model’ (Gavins and Stockwell 2012: 34). This book aims to contribute to the development of this linguistically focused approach within cognitive stylistics.

1.3 ‘Real’ readers An interest in reader experiences of mind style raises the question of which reader? One of the founding features of cognitive stylistics, as set out in Stockwell (2002: 2) and Gavins and Steen (2003: 1), was a call for attention to the ‘natural’ experiences of readers and investigation of the relationship between such readings and those of professional literary analysts. Beyond cognitive stylistics, stylistics more broadly has seen an increased specification of the reader underpinning analyses in relation to actual, socially situated individuals in the world, whether this be a specific group of informants in a seminar, book club or controlled experiment, or simply the analysts themselves (e.g. Jeffries 2001; Miall 2006; Hall 2008; Peplow et al. 2016). In this study, my analyses of the four novels are underpinned by reader responses to the texts from three different sources. First, my own introspective readings of the texts offer perhaps the most direct means of accessing the kinds of reading experiences I am interested in here. Alongside this first-person perspective, literary criticism provides a source of third-person responses to the texts and their mind styles. Finally, I carry out a study of reader responses to each text in a wider, nonacademic context. I adopt what Swann and Allington (2009) term a naturalistic approach to reader response research, in which reading behaviours are investigated in their usual environment, as opposed to controlled experimental conditions. Specifically, I carry out a qualitative analysis of a sample of hundred most recent ‘community reviews’ for each text on the online social reading network, Goodreads.com. The recurring themes identified in these datasets, alongside the literary critical interpretations of the texts that I review alongside them, outline the effects and research questions that my analyses seek to address.

7

Introduction

7

Qualitative analysis of online reader responses provides a number of benefits for my study of mind style. As an interesting point of comparison with the literary critical and stylistic readings I discuss, this source of data captures the responses of a larger and more varied sample of readers in a context outside of academic criticism (Gavins 2013: 8).1 These responses consist of readers’ unmediated descriptions and impressions of the texts, and have been voluntarily produced independent of my observation and the ‘observer’s paradox’ (Labov 1972a). My decision to collect and analyse only the hundred most recent reviews on this website is a further attempt to avoid the subjective bias which can threaten the analysis of such data. Uninfluenced by my research questions as far as possible, therefore, readers’ discursive choices in describing their experiences provide a useful starting point for modelling the processing that underpins them (Stockwell 2009: 78–91; Allington 2011; Whiteley 2011). However, as I  have discussed elsewhere, there are a number of issues affecting this source of data (Nuttall 2017: 156–7). Particularly significant for this study is the absence of researcher intervention in the data collection process. The lack of influence described above as an advantage also denies the researcher any control over the form, length or topic of the responses analysed. This means that the interests of this book will only be objects of study in my sample insofar as they are noticed and felt to be important by readers. While limiting the kinds of conclusions that can be drawn, this constraint offers a relatively unbiased means of investigating the distinctiveness of mind style, and a corrective for claims made as to its effects upon readers in my cognitive stylistic analysis. Finally, a brief note is necessary on the ethical considerations involved in this kind of analysis. Reviews published on Goodreads.com are reproduced here as they appeared publicly (i.e. open access) on this website.2 Since reviewers’ public usernames sometimes contain identifiable personal information, I have chosen to anonymise them here. Any information accessible only though password access by Goodreads’ users is not included in my data and the reviews I quote do not contain personal or potentially sensitive information about the reviewers themselves. In line with previous researchers, the use of public reviews as data can be regarded as ethically analogous to the use of other forms of published writing, such as reviews in newspapers and the discussions of literary critics (Allington 2007; Gavins 2013; Harrison 2017). Together with my own readings of the texts, these different types of first- and thirdperson responses offer a triangulation of perspectives on the texts I analyse. Vandaele and Brône (2009:  6) describe a ‘reconciliation’ or ‘middle ground’ between ‘rich first-person phenomenology and rigorous third-person observation’ as a beneficial objective for cognitive stylistics. Through a comparative approach, this book aims to develop an understanding of mind style that is relevant to the experiences of real readers in the world. In doing so, this book also aims to offer contributions to cognitive grammar. As I will argue in Chapter 3, the application of cognitive grammar in accounting for readers’ situated experiences of literary texts provides a valuable source of usage-based data for this theory, or an insight into language use and processing in a naturally occurring discourse context (cf. Kemmer and Barlow 2000). Stylistics has been characterized as a ‘parasitic’ discipline, or one which repeatedly draws upon concepts from cognitive

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disciplines for its own purposes, and the application of cognitive grammar has been identified as one such import (van Peer and Hakemulder 2014). Here, I  argue that this relationship should rather be seen as a ‘symbiotic’ one (Freeman 2007:  1177). Throughout this book, I hope to emphasize not only the benefits of cognitive grammar for stylistics, but also the insights offered by stylistics for cognitive grammar.

1.4 Speculative fiction Section 1.1 briefly introduced the four novels that provide the analytical basis for this study. My selection of these texts is motivated by my own experiences of them and, specifically, the impression of a distinctive mind style for their main character. Before developing the concept of mind style in Chapter 2, in this section I first position these texts within speculative fiction and outline some of the reading experiences associated with this genre which make it an interesting context for the study of mind style. The term ‘speculative fiction’, used by Atwood (2005, 2011) to describe her novel The Handmaid’s Tale, describes a type of fiction that is fundamentally concerned with ‘imagined other worlds’ (Atwood 2011:  8). Atwood distinguishes this genre from ‘science fiction’ on the basis of the relationship between these imagined worlds and that of the writer and reader: What I mean by ‘science fiction’ is those books that descend from H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, which treats of an invasion by tentacle, blood-sucking Martians shot to Earth in metal canisters – things that could not possibly happen – whereas, for me, ‘speculative fiction’ means plots that descend from Jules Verne’s books about submarines and balloon travel and such – things that really could happen but just hadn’t completely happened when the authors wrote the books. I would place my own books in this second category: no Martians. (2011: 6)

The distinction between ‘science fiction’ and ‘speculative fiction’, however, is extremely blurred (Atwood 2011:  3), and other writers and critics have tended to regard the two as equivalent or related terms for a single genre, often referred to by their shared initials – SF (e.g. Delany 2009; Le Guin 2009; Thomas 2013). As science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin (2009) observes, ‘One of the things science fiction does is to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near future that’s half prediction, half satire.’ In theoretical accounts of science fiction, furthermore, a scientific adherence to what is possible within such extrapolation, in the form of ‘cognitive logic’ (Suvin 1979: 93) or ‘the laws of nature’ (Amis 2000: 21), is often viewed as a defining feature of the genre, distinguishing it from ‘fantasy’. Notably, some of the most critically acclaimed science fiction texts draw not only upon the physical sciences of space travel (etc.) as the basis of such extrapolation, but also social sciences such as linguistics, psychology, politics and anthropology (Suvin 1979: 68). Through speculation in these terms, science fiction can be viewed as a thought experiment which explores the physical, psychological and sociopolitical implications of imagined other worlds for human beings, whether ‘utopian’, ‘dystopian’ or somewhere in between (Passell 2013).

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As Amis (2000:  26) puts it, ‘Science fiction presents with verisimilitude the human effects of spectacular changes in our environment, changes either deliberately willed or involuntarily suffered.’ While viewing speculative fiction and science fiction as closely related, I use the term speculative fiction to describe the texts I analyse in this book, as a label which best captures their shared concern with extrapolated physical/cultural environments, and their embodied psychological effects. Precise distinctions such as ‘science fiction’, ‘fantasy’, ‘utopia’ and ‘dystopia’ have been an ongoing concern among critics of this genre (e.g. Suvin 1979; Aldridge 1984; Moylan 2000; Williams 2010). Departing from this critical trend, in this book I am more concerned with the reader experiences that characterize such texts beyond these classifications and definitions. Similarly avoiding the ‘categorising syndrome’ of academic criticism on this subject, Stockwell (2000: 7–8) describes readers’ individual perceptions and expectations of this genre in cognitive linguistic terms, as a radial category organized relative to a central prototype (Ungerer and Schmid 2006:  1ff ). The texts I  analyse in Chapters  4 to 7 can all be variably categorized in terms of genre. The Handmaid’s Tale and Never Let Me Go are both seen by critics to blur the boundaries between science fiction and other forms of mainstream fiction (Atwood 2011; Shaddox 2013), while I Am Legend is variably classified as a work of science fiction, gothic horror and fantasy (Clasen 2010: 313). Finally, The Drowned World was characterized by Ballard (1996) as an explicit departure from the prototypical concerns of science fiction as a form of ‘inner space fiction’. What links these texts most usefully, I believe, is the nature of the reading experiences invited by the kinds of speculative worlds and characters they present. Speculative fiction can be distinguished from other types of fiction in terms of the specific nature of the other worlds it invites readers to experience (Csicsery-Ronay 2008). Suvin (1979) describes the experience of an unfamiliar reality in such fiction as giving rise to cognitive estrangement in readers, or an altered perspective on their own reality. This experience can be compared to the defamiliarization described by Shklovsky (1965) and viewed by the Russian formalists as a distinctive feature of all literature. Distinguishing this effect in speculative fiction is the extent of the deviation which characterizes the unfamiliar reality, through the ‘totalizing’ richness and complexity of its presentation (Suvin 1979:  70) and the ‘mapping of the whole textual universe with the reader’s reality’ that this invites (Stockwell 2000: 204, original emphasis). As shall be discussed in Chapter  2, defamiliarization is an effect that is often associated with mind style. The intensified version of this effect identified for the strange worlds of speculative fiction thus suggests a rich textual basis for a cognitive stylistic study of this concept. This genre might also be distinguished with regard to other aspects of world creation. Researchers have suggested a number of specific reading strategies invited in readers of this genre. In speculative fiction, it is argued, the relationship between character/ plot and setting in the worlds presented, or between foreground and background, is altered from that of realistic fiction, such that readers must pay greater attention to the background as part of a rich process of world building (Spencer 1983: 45; Moylan 2000: 5–6; Delany 2009: 79; Hills 2013). In constructing this rich background, readers, it is argued, must resolve a series of clues through a puzzle-solving activity comparable to that of detective fiction (Angenot 1979; Amis 2000: 34; Moylan 2000: 7).

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Finally, speculative fiction can also be set apart from other types of fiction in terms of the nature of the characters or other minds it presents. Centrally concerned with ‘alien modes of being’ (Parrinder 1979:  160), the characters presented often reflect alternative ways of thinking in response to physical, technological or social-cultural transformations in our environment. By investigating ‘the possibilities of changed embodiment for changing humanity’ through character, speculative fiction can be seen to explore issues of identity and subjectivity in relation to contemporary society (Vint 2006:  16). Furthermore, by presenting such speculative selves for empathetic engagement, identification and ethical judgement, speculative fiction is said to explore these issues as part of readers’ felt experiences of the text (Fitting 1987; Vint 2006; Hollinger 2000). Alongside such concerns, however, speculative fiction is often characterized as a genre in which a ‘mainstream’ or ‘realist’ preoccupation with individual consciousness is deprioritized in favour of characters who are seen as exemplary figures, ‘tokens’ or ‘types’ representative of mankind as a whole (Parrinder 1979; Sanders 1979; Spencer 1983; Le Guin 1989; Maule 1996). As Stockwell (1991: 110) describes, ‘in the SF genre, the idea of character often corresponds with humanity itself ’. While some critics have criticized the genre on these grounds (e.g. Le Guin 1989), others have argued that ‘this de-emphasis of psychological individuality is definitely not a way of abandoning human emotions and concerns’ (Scholes 1975: 48), but is itself a commentary upon the nature of social identity (Sanders 1979; Maule 1996). The significance of such collective or representative characters for the experience of mind style is another question raised by this genre. These features of speculative fiction will be explored in this book using a cognitive stylistic approach. Specifically, this book addresses three main reader experiences associated with this genre – and often used to define, praise or condemn it – in literary criticism: 1. the powerful defamiliarization of readers’ own worlds and worldviews; 2. the foregrounded world building or puzzle solving in relation to a fictional reality; 3. the exploration of questions of subjectivity and humanness through character. By investigating the extent to which such experiences manifest within the responses of real readers, and explaining their effects in terms of mind style and cognitive grammar, this work offers contributions to the study of speculative fiction. By adapting existing stylistic and cognitive linguistic concepts to include such strange worlds and minds, this book aims to develop accounts of estrangement, world creation and fictional consciousness that will hold beyond this genre, and the specific mind styles analysed.

1.5 The structure of this book In the chapters that follow, I  develop a cognitive grammatical approach to mind style and explore its application through the analysis of four speculative fiction texts. I begin in Chapter 2 by providing a detailed introduction to mind style, its theoretical

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background and the ongoing questions faced in its application. I situate mind style in relation to concepts of point of view, ideology and deviation in stylistics, along with research into mind attribution, experientiality and empathy in (cognitive) narratology. Finally, I argue for the importance of attending to reader minds alongside character minds in accounting for the role of mind style in our aesthetic, emotional and ethical experiences of literary texts. Chapter  3 introduces the key concepts that cognitive grammar offers to the study of mind style and develops these in relation to (literary) discourse. I compare cognitive grammar with the analytical frameworks offered by systemic-functional grammar (Halliday 1994; Halliday and Matthiessen 2004) and text world theory (Werth 1999; Gavins 2007). I  argue that these frameworks provide important benchmarks and insights for a useful cognitive grammar in stylistics and describe the benefits of this approach for our understanding of text worlds and the minds presented within them. Chapters  4 to 7 develop this approach through textual analyses of four novels. In each chapter, I  develop concepts from cognitive grammar in relation to existing work in the analysis of mind style through patterns of syntax, vocabulary, transitivity and metaphor, respectively. These concepts are then applied in a detailed analysis of a mind style, which is guided and supported by readers’ reported experiences of the text. Through each analysis, I demonstrate the application of key cognitive grammar concepts:  prominence, dynamicity (Chapter  4); focusing, specificity (Chapter  5); action chains, perspective (Chapter  6); fictivity and simulation (Chapter  7). These chapters aim to enrich the approach set out in Chapters  2 and 3 and incrementally develop a workable model for analysis beyond the texts examined. In Chapter 4, I apply the cognitive grammar concepts of prominence and dynamicity to readers’ conceptualization of the worlds presented in narrative. Through this means, I account for the significance of linguistic patterns in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) for the distinctive experience of its text world and the creation of a mind style for its character/narrator. Supported by stylistic research into iconicity (Burke 2001; Leech and Short 2007; Jeffries 2010), I  begin to examine the reader experience of mind style more closely, unpicking the ways in which it is attributed and enacted by readers. Chapter  5 applies the cognitive grammar concepts of focusing, reference point relationships and specificity in order to model the development of reader knowledge and the distinctive mind style it creates in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). Drawing on psycholinguistic and stylistic research into foregrounding and burying (Sanford and Emmott 2012; Emmott and Alexander 2014), I  discuss the qualitative experience of the knowledge readers are invited to share with a character as part of a mind style. Chapter  6 considers readers’ experiences of the multiple character minds conceptualized as part of a text world. I  apply cognitive grammar concepts of action chains and perspective alongside research in social psychology to discuss the representation of characters’ thoughts and action, and its contribution to a mind style in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954). This chapter marks a shift in my analyses, from consideration of mind style in first-person narratives in Chapters  4 and 5, to

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third-person narratives in Chapters  6 and 7. Here I  examine the consequences of differences of point of view for experiences of mind style. Chapter  7 draws together my discussion of mind style through application of a cognitive grammar account of simulation and its linguistic manipulation through fictive motion and metaphor. Supported by research in cognitive science and narratology, these concepts are used to account for a vivid, immersive experience of J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) and the deviant logic of its main character. I comment on the extent to which readers resist textual mind styles, drawing on responses which describe an uneasy experience of Ballard’s protagonist. Pursuing the implications of embodied cognition in cognitive grammar, I suggest that a mind style might be felt as well as perceived during reading. Finally, Chapter  8 summarizes the benefits of a cognitive grammatical approach for the study of mind style, while identifying further questions revealed through its application. I suggest that cognitive grammar lends a degree of specificity to our discussion of mind style, and the contextualized relationship between linguistic choice and effect that it represents. I also reflect upon the insights obtained through this application for cognitive grammar, including the development of its treatment of discourse and enrichment of its claims regarding naturally occurring language. Lastly, I make some concluding comments on the types of worlds and minds to which mind style is applied, and its ethical implications. I  suggest that the linguistic portrayal of distinctive minds, or minds perceived to be different to our own, provides an opportunity to reconsider what we believe to be ‘normal’.

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Mind style

2.1 Introduction Mind style is a key concept in stylistics and has had a central place since it emerged as a fully formed discipline in the 1980s. Chapters devoted to mind style can be found in seminal works by Fowler (1996 [1986]), Leech and Short (2007 [1981]), as well as contemporary stylistic handbooks (Stockwell and Whiteley 2014; Sotirova 2016). Despite this long-standing interest, a range of issues have been repeatedly identified in accounts of mind style. As we shall see in this chapter, these issues often reflect bigger theoretical and practical questions for the analysis of style more broadly. In Section 2.2 I  discuss mind style’s theoretical background and the links with systemic-functional grammar which have often provided a basis for its analysis. Next, in Sections 2.3 and 2.4, I review the questions that have arisen in subsequent applications of this concept, including its relationship with other established concepts in stylistics such as point of view, style, ideology and deviation. Section 2.5 introduces previous work on mind style from a cognitive stylistic perspective and the discussion of fictional minds and empathy in cognitive narratology. Finally, in Section 2.6, I discuss the felt effects of mind style, drawing connections between mind style and specific aspects of readers’ experiences of literary texts.

2.2 Mind style and systemic-functional grammar Fowler (1977:  103) introduced the concept of mind style to refer to ‘any distinctive linguistic presentation of an individual mental self ’. His discussion of this linguistic effect applied concepts from Halliday’s (1971, 1973, 1978) model of systemic-functional grammar. The ability of language to encode different worldviews is described in the Hallidayan model as its ideational metafunction. According to Halliday (1971: 332), it is through this function that the speaker or writer embodies in language his experience of the phenomena of the real world; and this includes his experience of the internal world of his own consciousness.

Fowler emphasizes that language does not merely represent experience through this function but also plays a role in structuring it. Writing in the 1980s, Fowler draws

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on emergent research in cognitive psychology into categorization (e.g. Rosch 1978) to observe that ‘people analyse the world, sort it into categories; impose structure on it, in order to avoid being overwhelmed by its richness’ (1996 [1986]:  26–7). In line with cognitive theories of embodiment, Fowler suggests that some of a language’s semantic categories constitute basic ‘cognitive categories’, which arise due to ‘the way we are constructed biologically’ (1996:  27). However, he suggests, ‘the majority are not natural’ but rather ‘social’ categories (27, original emphasis) which arise in order to serve the needs, habits and interests of a particular society or culture. These social categories and the ‘social processes’ involved in their formation through discourse are Fowler’s primary concern (1996:  25). While sharing a common basis in the ideas of early cognitive linguistics, developing contemporaneously during the 1980s, Fowler’s sociolinguistic emphasis, and that of others such as Fairclough (1989), can be contrasted with the corresponding emphasis upon the ‘natural’ or cognitive categories seen in theories such as Langacker’s (1987, 1991) cognitive grammar (CG; see Section 3.2). In this book, I argue that these two perspectives can be usefully reunited in the analysis of mind style. For Fowler, the categories available in our language both reflect and influence the ways in which we conceive the world. They provide a means of making sense of our world, which through repeated use forms a ‘worldview’ – a ‘theory’, ‘ideology’ or ‘conventional code’ that is accepted as natural or ‘common sense’ (Fowler 1996: 26, 42). While recognizing the processing benefits of such categories in making our experience of the world ‘simple and manageable’, Fowler emphasizes the ‘dangers’ of common sense worldviews (1996: 40). Bound up with conventional codes, we are told, are social processes of legitimization and habitualization (1996:  42). Through habitualization, following Shklovsky (1965), language reflects a tendency towards automaticity in perception and a resulting ‘dulling of thought’ (Fowler 1996: 46). This discussion is comparable with the argument for linguistic relativity commonly known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, or the idea that ‘the structure and lexicon in one’s language influences how one perceives and conceptualizes the world, and they do so in a systematic way’ (Swoyer 2008). While pursuing this argument, Fowler follows Halliday (1971) in avoiding an ‘extreme pseudo-Whorfian position’, or an argument for linguistic determinism, by acknowledging that language encodes not one but multiple alternative ways of viewing the world. Rather than reflecting a ‘single, allencompassing world-view’, the ideational function of language provides a ‘repertoire of perspectives relative to the numerous registers of discourse in which a speaker participates’ (1996:  212). By participating in such discourses, a speaker can see the world in different ways. For Fowler (1996:  213), the presentation of mind styles in literary discourse is one opportunity to see reality in a different light. Both the reading of texts and their linguistic criticism, it is argued, may contribute to the experience of defamiliarization (Shklovsky 1965), or the deautomatization of worldview (Fowler 1996: 48). In addition, ‘cumulative ideational structuring’ by speakers and writers is also said to form the basis for worldviews which emerge through choices of style or register within nonliterary discourse (Fowler 1996:  213). The analysis of the linguistically encoded worldviews encountered in other discourse contexts is the subject of critical discourse analysis, a

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field in which Fowler is also a key figure (e.g. Fowler et al. 1979). However, in this field, the related term ‘ideology’ has more often been applied (Fairclough 1989; van Dijk 1995, 1997; Hart 2010, 2014). The relationship between these two notions is returned to in Section 2.4. The ideational metafunction is one of three interwoven and simultaneously operative functions of language in Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar, including also the interpersonal metafunction and the textual metafunction (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004:  29–31). The interpersonal metafunction describes our use of language to communicate our attitudes, evaluations and personalities, and to establish relationships with an addressee. As Fowler describes, this function involves the recognition that ‘when speakers produce an utterance or a text, they are not simply saying something about the world or their ideas, they are doing something by uttering’ (1977: 77, original emphasis). This awareness is significant for mind style, since the signalling of social identity within a community and the representation of worldview are ‘undoubtedly related’ (Fowler 1977:  77); the latter is likely to be influenced or motivated by the former. In other words, ‘ideational answers to interpersonal structure’ (1977: 77–8). Since, even in written discourse, whether consciously or unconsciously, we address another participant with their own attitudes and beliefs, the linguistic choices of an author, narrator or character can be analysed in terms of the relationship they construct with a reader, narratee or other character, and the identity they construct for themselves. Highlighting this interpersonal metafunction, Bockting (1994: 171–2) defines mind style as ‘the linguistic expression of the conceptualisation of the world achieved by the individual, including the conceptualisation of the individual himself in this particular world’. Finally, the textual metafunction may also have significance for mind style. This function relates to the ‘creation of text’ or the organization of clauses, sentences, paragraphs, etc. into an ‘operational unit’ at the discourse level (Halliday 1971: 334). While structuring the flow of information, a writer’s choices with regard to textual structure, such as cohesion, progression and thematization, may also have consequences for ideational meaning (Fowler 1996: 82–90). The integrated model offered by systemic-functional grammar can be viewed as a useful ‘benchmark’ for the stylistic application of CG. Stockwell (2014a) observes that the impressive reach of SFG into interpersonal and ideological matters can be set also as a useful requirement of other grammatical approaches to stylistics. In this respect, we can treat SFG as a benchmark for any adequate model of analysis. The use of cognitive grammar in literary stylistics must be at least as good as previous practices, in order to justify overcoming the inertia of sticking with the same paradigmatic model. (p. 20)

Alongside an account of the conceptual import of ideational patterns, a useful approach to mind style using CG must therefore be able to account for the interpersonal and textual functioning of such patterns and their specific, creative uses within literary texts. In Chapter 3, I argue that CG shares many fundamental concepts and assumptions with systemic-functional grammar, which make it an appropriate

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framework in this respect. Specifically, the ideational metafunction bears direct comparison with notions of experiential realism and construal in CG and cognitive linguistics more broadly (Section 3.2). The interpersonal metafunction can be compared with the concept of a viewing arrangement (Section 3.4), and the textual metafunction with the discussion of structure building at a discourse level (Section 3.6). The advantages of reconceptualizing these existing ideas in this way will be explored in the textual analyses which follow in Chapters 4 to 7.

2.3 Mind style and point of view Mind style is a specific manifestation of a wider narrative phenomenon of point of view, describing the viewpoint or perspective from which a story is presented. In its long history of debate in narratology, a number of key issues have been highlighted with regard to point of view. First is the need for a distinction between two aspects of narrative practice, identified by Genette (1980) as voice and vision, or the separate matters of ‘Who speaks?’ and ‘Who sees?’. Genette (1980) proposes that ‘focalization’ (equivalent to the Anglo-American concept of ‘point of view’) be reserved for the latter. However, doubts as to the logical basis of this distinction have been repeatedly expressed. Since the act of narration often presupposes a witnessing of the events described, and a perspective on events forms an inherent part of its description, the strict separation Genette proposes is a ‘logical impossibility’ (McIntyre 2006: 36) and the two better seen as ‘two sides of the same process of sense-generation’ (Grishakova 2002:  529; see also Palmer 2004:  50). Reflecting this fuzzy boundary, terms such as ‘voice’ and ‘viewpoint’ are often used interchangeably in applications of mind style to characters and narrators (e.g. Stockwell 2009; Gregoriou 2014). In a useful clarification, Herman (2009a) has argued for a reconciliation of voice and vision in terms of the cognitive linguistic concept of construal. Herman asserts that the shared cognitive mechanisms underpinning language and perception described in cognitive grammatical frameworks offer a holistic, integrated understanding of narrative perspective, as ‘a reflex of the mind or minds conceptualizing scenes’ (2009a:  123). In my view, this understanding of point of view is most appropriate for discussions of mind style, so I  use the term ‘construal’ (as opposed to ‘voice’ or ‘viewpoint’) as far as possible in this book. The concept of construal and its application to point of view is discussed in more detail in the next chapter. A further problem for ‘point of view’ is the limited understanding of this phenomenon suggested by the term’s connotations of visual perception (RimmonKenan 1983: 71). Toolan (2001: 60) proposes ‘orientation’ as a term that would help us to remember the cognitive, emotional and ideological aspects of narrative perspective alongside its perceptual aspects. Exemplifying this broad understanding, Fowler (1996) situates mind style within a multidimensional model of point of view derived from that of Uspensky (1973) and consisting of three main facets: (a) point of view on the spatial and temporal plane, (b) point of view on the ideological plane and (c) point of view on the psychological plane.

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Spatiotemporal point of view refers to the position in space and time from which a scene is viewed, and includes the manner in which it is viewed in terms of the scale, continuity, distance and movement of this vantage point (Fowler 1996: 162–5). Ideological point of view, on the other hand, refers to the attitudes implicit within the description of a scene, or ‘the system of beliefs, values, and categories by reference to which a person or a society comprehends the world’ (1996:  165), and is viewed by Fowler as equivalent to mind style (1996: 214). Closely related to – and in some senses encompassing  – the previous two, psychological point of view concerns the positioning of this perspective in relation to the characters, or the answers to questions such as: Who, within the compositional structure of the work, is the vehicle for the ideology? Is it the author speaking through the narrative voice, or is it a character or characters? And is there a single dominating world-view, or a plurality of ideological positions? (Fowler 1996: 166)

Fowler’s discussion of psychological point of view draws upon the distinctions made in accounts of focalization (Genette 1980; Bal 1985) as well as those concerning the representation of speech and thought. Fowler (1996) follows Uspensky in making a basic distinction between those perspectives which are internal, with access to the thoughts, feelings and ideologies of characters, and those that are external, which lack such privileged access to their minds, before dividing these into further subtypes. This typology, further developed by Simpson (1993), reveals the range of perspectives through which a mind style may be expressed, including not only the first-person internal perspective of a participating character (Genette’s [1980] homodiegetic narration) but also third-person internal narratives from the perspective of a nonparticipating narrator (Genette’s heterodiegetic narration; see Bockting 1995; Semino 2002; Gregoriou 2003 for examples of both). In third-person narratives, Fowler (1996: 174) notes, the possibility of a distinction between the perspective of the narrator and that of a character-focalizer creates the potential for a juxtaposition of worldviews, and the effects described by Bakhtin (1981) as heteroglossia and dialogism. Taking this further, the detection of mind style(s) in such circumstances might also contribute to the so-called dual-voice effect of free indirect discourse (Pascal 1977). Mind style can therefore be seen as the what – the set of values and beliefs presented through the language of the text; while psychological point of view describes the who – the ‘vehicle’ to which this worldview is attributed. However, as may already have become clear, these dimensions of point of view are fairly difficult to distinguish. The overlap between them is exemplified in Gregoriou (2003:  133) where ‘the nature of the narration chosen, the extent to which the reader is allowed access to the criminals’ consciousness, and the way in which that consciousness is portrayed’ are all said to contribute to the mind style of criminal characters. Indeed, Simpson (1993) proposes that we integrate the various dimensions of point of view into a broader sense of ‘psychological point of view’ within literary texts, which encompasses spatiotemporal

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positioning along with mind style. For Semino and Swindlehurst (1996), however, point of view and mind style remain distinct: Clearly, we can perceive a character’s mind style only if we are presented with his or her point of view. The reverse, however, is not always true. The access to a character’s point of view does not necessarily imply access to his or her mind style. (p. 145)

To illustrate this point, they refer to the openings of Dickens’s Great Expectations and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (reproduced below). While both present the point of view of a child, only the latter presents this child character’s mind style through its sentence structure and lexis. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things, seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain, that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried. (Dickens 1999 [1861]: 1) Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. (Joyce 2008 [1916]: 1)

Following Semino and Swindlehurst, I  maintain a theoretical distinction between point of view (the spatiotemporal/psychological orientation of perspective within a narrative) and the mind style which may or may not be suggested by the language which characterizes it. In practice, however, the former may often be an important factor in our experience of the latter. The relationship between mind style and these other aspects of point of view, or the experiential significance of the choice of ‘vehicle’ (Fowler 1996: 166) through which a mind style is expressed, is a question which a cognitive stylistic approach might seek to clarify. While character mind styles have been inferred from both first-person and third-person narratives, the specific effects of such differences of point of view for mind style have received little attention. The mind styles I analyse here include both the character/narrators of first-person narratives (in Chapters 4 and 5) and focalizing characters within third-person narratives (in Chapter 6 and 7).

2.4 Mind style and deviation Alongside its relationship to point of view, an important issue faced by mind style concerns the extent of its application. Leech and Short (2007:  151) observe that all texts might be said to contain a mind style, since ‘even in apparently normal pieces of writing, the writer slants us towards a particular “mental set”:  there is no kind of writing that can be regarded as perfectly neutral and objective’. Leech and Short analyse a range of mind styles, progressing from those which ‘easily strike a reader as

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natural and uncontrived’ to those which ‘clearly impose an unorthodox conception of the fictional world’ (Leech and Short 2007:  151). While accepting the theoretical validity of this argument, stylisticians have questioned the usefulness of mind style at the ‘normal’ end of this cline, and the extent to which normal mind styles can be distinguished from a more general notion of ‘style’ (Short 1994:  2504; Semino and Swindlehurst 1996: 145). As Semino (2007: 169) points out, this issue can be related to a degree of ambiguity as to whether ‘mind style’ refers to ‘linguistic patterns in texts (“style”) or to the characteristics that we attribute to particular (fictional) minds by interpreting linguistic patterns in texts’. In my view, the concept of mind style refers to both the linguistic patterns of the text and the fictional consciousness constructed in the mind of the reader. I regard mind style as an aspect of the interaction between textuality and reader which Stockwell (2009) terms texture, and I use ‘mind style’ to refer holistically to this phenomenon, as ‘the combined experiential quality of the reader’s feelings occasioned by the patterning in the text itself ’ (Stockwell 2010: 424). Differentiating ‘mind style’ from ‘style’ is the reader’s attribution of these linguistic patterns to an individual mind. Returning to Leech and Short’s ‘normal mind styles’ with this clarified terminology, if the trailing syntax and detailed attention to social matters in Henry James’s narratives are attributed by a reader to the ‘complex social vision’ of its author, then this justifies the term ‘mind style’ (2007: 157). However, the extent to which such ‘uncontrived’ worldviews will ‘strike’ the reader (Leech and Short 2007:  151), and so give rise to an interpretation of mind style, is another matter. While styles can be ‘transparent’ or ‘opaque’ to varying degrees, it is those which are deviant or foregrounded which are typically of most interest to stylisticians (Leech and Short 2007:  24; McIntyre and Price forthcoming). Stylistic choices which deviate from some intra- or extratextual norm, and which ‘stand out’ (or are prominent) as a result, are often seen to hold interpretative significance, an effect referred to as foregrounding (Mukařovský 1964). Within this stylistic context, discussions of mind style have argued that its relevance is best seen where foregrounded linguistic patterns also suggest an unorthodox or ‘deviant’ view of the world (Semino and Swindlehurst 1996: 145; McIntyre 2006: 144; Hoover 2016: 338). Taking this further, Stockwell’s (2009:  125) argument that ‘only those viewpoints that are regarded as non-normative and idiosyncratic are actually noticed in natural reading’ contributes to a restricted definition of mind style as ‘the presentation of a highly deviant or at least very unusual worldview’. Following this view, applications of mind style reveal a tendency to focus on examples at the ‘unorthodox’ end of Leech and Short’s cline, and the mind styles of characters which are ‘more readily discernible as odd’ (Leech and Short 2007: 162), than those observed at other levels of narrative structure. More specifically, mind style has become ‘associated with those narratives in which narrator and/or characters display certain unconventional psychological traits’ (Montoro 2010: 31) and often those which seemingly represent identifiable cognitive conditions such as autism, schizophrenia and depression (Bockting 1995; Semino and Swindlehurst 1996; Montoro 2010; Semino 2011, 2014; Demjén 2015), or the ‘special mental tendency’ associated with criminal minds (Gregoriou 2003:  125; see also Semino 2002; Fanlo Piniés 2005).

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While agreeing with the basic need for both conceptual and linguistic deviation in the recognition of a mind style (or the need that the mind be ‘individual’ and expressed through linguistic patterns that are ‘distinctive’; Fowler 1977: 76), restricted application to just those minds we are able to define or diagnose in psychological terms risks losing some of the critical value and attractiveness of the original model. Taking as a primary assumption that ‘what we call “reality” is the result of perceptual and cognitive processes that may vary in part from person to person’ (Semino and Swindlehurst 1996: 144), or the cognitive linguistic principle of experiential realism (Section 3.2), the proportion of those worldviews associated with cognitive conditions for which we have developed names and definitions represents the tip of the iceberg. Fowler (1996) emphasizes the range of more subtle effects captured by mind style, including the ominous sense of threat in Gothic texts, and the mind styles which characterize violent and pornographic narratives. Though less easy to define, when attributed to an individual consciousness or idiosyncratic manner of conceiving the world, such impressions of a worldview certainly contribute to the characterization of a character or narrator. Moreover, in Fowler’s original definition, mind style includes aspects of worldview that are radical and superficial, inherent and socially imposed: A mind style may analyse a character’s mental life more or less radically; may be concerned with relatively superficial or relatively fundamental aspects of the mind; may seek to dramatize the order and structure of conscious thoughts, or just present the topics on which a character reflects, or display preoccupations, prejudices, perspectives and values which strongly bias a character’s world-view but of which s/he may be quite unaware. (Fowler 1977: 103)

Semino’s analysis of the eccentric character, Alekos, in Louis de Bernières’s Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (Semino 2002) and the distinct personalities and preoccupations of the characters in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times and Joanne Harris’s Chocolat (Semino 2006a) reflect this broader application of mind style. In Chapters 4 to 7, I investigate the application of mind style to the minds of characters encountered within the strange worlds of speculative fiction. Though analysed from a cognitive perspective, the deviation which foregrounds these mind styles in readers’ attention is not associated with specific cognitive conditions, but rather the effects of the characters’ physical and social environment and their individual personality traits. A related question for mind style concerns its relationship with the concept of ideological point of view. While Fowler presents ‘ideological point of view’, ‘worldview’ and ‘mind style’ as synonymous, such terms can be usefully distinguished (Semino and Swindlehurst 1996; Semino 2002). Semino argues for a distinction between the aspects of worldviews represented by ‘ideological point of view’ and ‘mind style’ in the following terms: The notion of ‘ideological point of view’ is most apt to capture those aspects of world views that are social, cultural or political in origin, and which an individual is likely to share with others belonging to similar social, cultural and religious groups.

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[. . .] The notion of ‘mind style’, on the other hand, is most apt to capture those aspects of world views that are primarily personal and cognitive in origin. (2002: 97)

With the same linguistic patterns potentially indicative of either type of worldview, the distinction lies with the interpretation of the reader. Other analysts, however, have been critical of this distinction. Weber (2004) argues that the two are ‘inextricably linked’ and views this distinction as ‘blunting the political edge of the concept of mind style’ seen in Fowler’s critical linguistic model, and ‘restricting its use to a small number of deviant cases’ (2004: 251). Furthermore, as others have acknowledged, this distinction is difficult to apply in practice (McIntyre 2005: 24; Semino 2007: 169). Despite these doubts, these terms tend to be applied separately, with ‘mind style’ preferred for idiosyncratic worldviews (e.g. Bockting 1994; McIntyre 2005) and ‘ideological point of view’ for worldviews with wider sociocultural relevance (e.g. Simpson 1993; Hoover 2016). As McIntyre (2006: 143) suggests, though perhaps best thought of as ‘heuristic notions only’, they are ‘helpful terms to have to talk sensibly about the particular aspects of worldview to which they refer’. This distinction is related to the question of normality and deviation. Stockwell (2009:  124) models a ‘cline of viewpoints’, ranging from those naturalized, socially shared ideological points of view which appear ‘normal’, to those idiosyncratic, ‘deviant’ viewpoints which we attribute to a mind style. Such a cline does not fully resolve the practical application of these concepts, as socially shared ideologies (such as racism) may appear far from normal to those outside or within a given speech community. Such a ‘cline’, however, coincides with accounts of ideology in critical discourse analysis. In van Dijk’s account (1995, 1997), all mental representations of discourse ‘embody the interface between episodic, personal knowledge of events, [. . .] and the socially shared beliefs of groups’ (1997: 190). In light of such theory, a ‘cline’ or ‘continuum’ of interpretation seems a good way of approaching this heuristic distinction in literary reading, and the ‘interface’ at its centre (see also Fanlo Piniés 2005: 164; Semino 2007: 169). The positioning of a worldview along this cline is not the only interpretative judgement involved in the attribution of mind style. In his analysis of Miss Shepherd in Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van, McIntyre (2005) observes the need for a further distinction between those mind styles which reflect ‘a genuine cognitive impairment’ and those which reflect ‘conversational tactics’ on the part of a character (2005: 21). However, as his analysis also reveals, distinguishing the two types of mind style – as with distinguishing mind style from ideological point of view – is likely to be difficult. McIntyre (2005) comes to the conclusion that both factors are involved in the mind style he considers: Miss Shepherd’s flawed inductive reasoning is both a conversational choice aimed at denying responsibility for past events and a cognitive impairment resulting from years of this very practice. This distinction between mind style as cognitive habit and rhetorical strategy might be described in systemic-functional grammar terms as a privileging of the ideational or interpersonal metafunction in the interpretation of a mind style, respectively. Since these two functions are typically

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interwoven in language (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004: 60), the difficulties in making this distinction and their combined contribution to the interpretation of mind style are to be expected. A final issue for the study of mind style is that of consistency and its contribution to the experience of deviation held responsible for this textual effect. While individual linguistic choices may be striking or grammatically deviant, the condition that linguistic choices be ‘cumulative’ and ‘consistent’ (Fowler 1977: 76) (or foregrounded through parallelism) is often emphasized in discussions of mind style (e.g. Semino and Swindlehurst 1996; McIntyre 2005; Semino 2007). As McIntyre and Archer (2010) argue, consistency presents a ‘thorny problem’ for studies of mind style, and the qualitative approach to textual analysis typically adopted in such research: The issue of consistency is something that purely qualitative analyses of mind style miss. This is unsurprising since in any such analyses there is the inherent problem of how to measure consistency. The difficulty, of course, is the issue of what to measure. Do we count the number of instances of a particular linguistic feature (say, instances of transitive verbs being used intransitively), and if so, against what norm would we compare such a figure? Clearly, such a method of measuring consistency would be both unsatisfactory and methodologically unsound. (p. 169)

These questions relate to broader issues in measuring style and in the establishment of a ‘norm’ against which to judge deviation. Such issues, Leech and Short argue, are particularly pronounced in the analysis of prose fiction, where ‘the problem of how to select – what sample passages, what features to study – is more acute and the incompleteness of even the most detailed analysis more apparent’ (2007: 3). The ways in which the patterns giving rise to mind style are evidenced by stylisticians is highly variable, with some analyses providing textual examples and others drawing on corpus methodologies to provide quantitative data of varying complexity (McIntyre and Archer 2010; Semino 2011; Stockwell and Mahlberg 2015). However, consistency is perhaps better seen as just one source of the foregrounding which gives rise to the recognition of a mind style. Semino (2014) suggests that just a ‘few salient examples’ across a text may be sufficient to create a mind style: when a particular (linguistic) behaviour is foregrounded through ‘deviation’ from default or conventional expectations, a few instances of that behaviour may be sufficient to attribute a (mental) trait to a character, even though that character does not exhibit that behaviour consistently. (p. 154)

As she also observes, the consistency with which linguistic choices are presented in a text is limited by the demands of ‘readable and effective’ narrative (Semino 2014: 154). While the frequency of a mundane or marked linguistic choice is one way in which the language of a character or narrator may be foregrounded, individual or locally restricted choices may also be foregrounded where they depart from our expectations to a sufficient extent.

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Drawing on such considerations, I support my analyses of mind style in Chapters 4 to 7 through the inclusion of examples from the texts I analyse. While some of these examples reflect linguistic choices restricted to a specific scene or part of the text, others are identified as representative of wider patterns noticed during my reading, or those of other readers. Crucially, it is the systematic patterns formed between the linguistic choices I  highlight at the textual level, or their consistent and cumulative effects on reader processing, which is said to be constitutive of a mind style, and which can be evaluated based on the evidence I  provide. The extent to which real readers actually notice the patterns and experience the effects observed can be evaluated in light of the reader responses I analyse alongside them. From these beginnings, the study of mind style has incorporated insights from various subdisciplines emerging within stylistics and linguistics more broadly. In her analysis of the mind styles of William Faulkner’s characters, Bockting makes the following proposal: The linguistic choices that form our material must concern the whole field of linguistics: phonology, morphology, lexis, syntax and pragmatics, as well as various para- and non-verbal signs. (1994: 160)

Alongside the use of vocabulary and syntax described in its early applications, features identified as contributing to a character or narrator’s mind style include foregrounded patterns in the use of metaphor (Black 1993; Semino and Swindlehurst 1996; Semino 2002, 2006) and the representation of speech and thought (Bockting 1995; Semino 2011). The communicative behaviour of characters, or the pragmatic features of their interactions with others, have also been found to be an important source of inferences regarding mind style (Culpeper 2001; Fanlo Piniés 2005; McIntyre 2005, 2006; Semino 2007, 2014; Bousfield 2014). Finally, initial steps have been taken to explore the contribution of paralinguistic and nonverbal features to the creation of mind style (Montoro 2010). A significant advancement in the analysis of mind style is the application of concepts and frameworks from the cognitive sciences. The following section introduces the cognitive stylistic work on mind style that this study advances.

2.5 Cognitive approaches to fictional minds Beginning with the application of cognitive linguistic accounts of metaphor by Black (1993) and concepts from psychology and psychiatry by Bockting (1994, 1995), the ‘individual mental self ’ described by Fowler (1977) has gained an increasing level of detail and specification in cognitive terms. In this cognitive stylistic approach, ‘mind style is to do with how language reflects the particular conceptual structures and cognitive habits that characterise an individual’s worldview’ (Semino 2002: 95). One of the earliest and most influential cognitive frameworks applied to mind style is conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff and Turner 1989). This cognitive linguistic theory of metaphor has been applied as a means of accounting

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for the mind styles constructed through metaphorical patterns (Black 1993; Semino and Swindlehurst 1996; Semino 2002, 2006a; Montoro 2010). The related framework of conceptual integration theory (Fauconnier and Turner 2002) has also been applied in order to describe the mental processing underlying specific metaphorical expressions (Semino 2002, 2006b). Finally, accounts of schemata (Bartlett 1932; Rumelhart 1980) and scripts (Schank and Abelson 1977) in psychology and artificial intelligence research have been used to provide cognitive accounts of the knowledge or ‘conceptual repertoire’ (Fowler 1996:  215) of a character or narrator revealed by their lexical choices (Semino 2002). This cognitive account allows the way in which characters use and develop knowledge in comprehending their experiences to be identified as part of a mind style. The developing cognitive stylistic approach to mind style can be viewed in the context of an increasing interest in fictional consciousness more broadly within contemporary narratology. In her influential account, Fludernik (1996) identifies experientiality, or the representation of events and situations relative to an experiencing consciousness, as a defining feature of narrative. Palmer takes a more radical position, asserting that ‘in essence, narrative is the description of fictional mental functioning’ (2004: 12). For Palmer, and others aligned with this view, our recognition of character minds is crucial to our understanding of fictional narratives and the situations presented within them. As well as enabling understanding, fictional minds are said to be the source of ‘conflicts’ (Palmer 2004: 194), or ‘world disruption’ (Herman 2009b: 222), which underpin the aesthetic appeal of plot and narrative ‘tellability’ (Labov 1972b). Most importantly, perhaps, engaging with other minds is enjoyable, and the opportunities and challenges offered by narrative in this respect are said to be a central motivation for reading fiction (Zunshine 2006). Developing this argument, Herman (2009b: 224–55) views the presentation of qualia, defined in philosophy as ‘what it is like’ to be someone else, as a specialized feature of narrative. In his view, narrative is ‘a mode of representation tailor-made for gauging the felt quality of lived experiences’ (2009b: 225). Alongside these arguments for the importance of fictional minds, these approaches also share a cognitive focus. Common among the accounts detailed above is a call for the application of research into ‘real minds’ within the cognitive sciences to our understanding of fictional minds. Underpinning this call is the idea that the cognitive processes involved in our experiences of real and fictional minds share fundamental similarities (Herman 2011a: 10; Palmer 2011a: 206). Some support for this idea can be gathered from observing real readers. While humanizing approaches to fictional characters have been criticized in academic circles (see Culpeper 2001:  6–7 for a review), readers are said to talk about and conceive of characters as life-like individuals and endow them with the same psychological abilities, emotions and dispositions expected of people in the world (Margolin 2003: 284; Gavins 2007: 64). As Stockwell (2009: 116) observes, the impersonation of characters in this way is ‘a key canonising feature in both scholarly literary criticism and for natural readers’. The application of cognitive research concerning real-world minds provides a basis for understanding how this impersonation comes about. This approach contradicts what Herman (2011a: 8) refers to as the ‘Exceptionality Thesis’ – the view of narrative as offering a form of direct access to ‘Transparent Minds’

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which is unique (Cohn 1978). As Herman (2011a:  8–9) points out, research in the cognitive sciences rejects the Cartesian dualism underpinning this argument, and its sense of a boundary between ‘mind’ and ‘world’ which can be crossed in fiction, in favour of an understanding of minds as ‘inextricably embedded in contexts for action and interaction’ (see also Gallacher and Hutto 2008). Research into cognition that is embodied, situated, distributed and engaged suggests that lots of our everyday experiences of both real and fictional minds come from simply observing behaviour in context: Just as in real life the individual constructs the minds of others from their behaviour and speech, so the reader infers the workings of fictional minds and sees these minds in action from observation of characters’ behaviour and speech. In one sense, as Laing says, we are invisible to each other. But in another sense the workings of our minds are perfectly visible to others in our actions. (Palmer 2004: 11)

Rather than distinguishing real minds as hidden and fictional minds as accessible, both can then be positioned along a single scale of accessibility, in which ‘minds of all sorts can be more or less directly encountered or experienced – depending on the circumstances’ (Herman 2011a: 9). Alongside the similarities between real and fictional minds, it is important to acknowledge the differences that exist between them. As Palmer (2011b:  380) argues:  ‘We will not understand fictional minds unless we understand both of these aspects:  both their similarities to, and their differences from, real minds’ (original emphasis). Stockwell (2009:  140) identifies ‘the crucial difference’ between our experiences of real and fictional minds as located in ‘the fictional boundary that intervenes in a literary account’. Similarly, others have highlighted the epistemological effects of the mediating voice (or mind) of a narrator or implied author that sets these experiences apart (Bortolussi 2011: 285; Kafalenos 2011: 255). Porter Abbott (2011) writes: This extra mind reveals itself in myriad ways – in its narrative voices, in focalization, in the ordering of events, in what it includes and what it omits, in where along the chain of events it chooses to dwell at length, and so on. (p. 328)

Finally, while the cognitive processes enabling our understanding of fictional minds may not be exceptional, the linguistic techniques found in literature for the manipulation of such processes enable effects and responses which go beyond our everyday experiences (Herman 2011a: 9; Miall 2005: 151). Rundquist argues that the potentially accessible domains of characters’ minds far exceed those of real people in social interaction, and they also are accessible via different means. For one, fiction can convey the silent private discourse (inner speech) that an individual does not choose to communicate. But also, and much more importantly, narrative fiction can access thoughts and other facets of consciousness that do not

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Such distinctive forms and effects are aspects of fictional minds that should be captured alongside the cognitive mechanics they share with real-world minds. Insights from the cognitive sciences are said to provide a more complete understanding of the minds inferred or constructed for characters (Margolin 2003; Herman 2007), or what Palmer (2004, 2010, 2011a) variably terms the whole mind, the social mind or the mind in action. Palmer regards previous approaches to focalization, characterization and representations of speech and thought as failing to add up to a ‘complete and coherent study’ of fictional minds (2004:  12). In particular, he criticizes what he terms the ‘speech category approach’ in discussions of consciousness representation (e.g. Cohn 1978; McHale 1978; Banfield 1982; Fludernik 1993). This approach, he argues, overestimates private, introspective and verbalized aspects of consciousness such as ‘inner speech’, at the expense of other states of mind including moods, sensations, attitudes and beliefs (Palmer 2004:  53–86). Palmer (2010:  39) proposes that we broaden our understanding of fictional minds beyond this ‘internalist perspective’ to include a complementary ‘externalist perspective’ on the mind, which takes into account research into those aspects of real-world minds that are ‘outer, active, public, social, behavioral, evident, embodied, and engaged’. One concept that has had a central role in this discussion is Theory of Mind (ToM). This is defined in psychology as our fundamental human capacity to attribute mental states to others based on their behaviour (Premack and Woodruff 1978; Baron-Cohen et  al. 1985; Frith and Frith 2003). The precise nature of this capacity has been the subject of ongoing debate in the cognitive sciences, and this debate has been carried over in its application to narrative. Explanations of the cognitive processes involved are divided between theory theory, which argues for the inference of mental states based on the application of folk psychological knowledge (e.g. Gopnik and Wellmann 1994), and simulation theory, which argues that this understanding arises through an imaginative enactment of another’s experiences involving the activation of ‘mirror neurons’ (Gallese and Goldman 1998; Rizzolatti and Craighero 2004; Goldman 2006). While researchers have associated this capacity with specific areas of the brain through neuroimaging (e.g. Frith and Frith 2003), the debate between these accounts remains unresolved, with evidence for either explanation repeatedly brought to light. Given this ‘impasse’ in cognitive science, it has been suggested that theory and simulation be viewed as ‘parallel’, and perhaps complementary, mechanisms in social cognition (Kerr 2008: 209). It seems feasible that multiple types of input may be involved in our appreciation of other minds, with both folk psychological knowledge and perceptual cues contributing to a variable extent (Frith and Frith 2006; Hooker et al. 2008: 204). Equally, both mechanisms may be seen to have a part to play in readers’ experiences of fictional minds (Palmer 2004: 144–5; Vermeule 2010: 35; Herman 2011a: 14). For such researchers, the possession of ToM, or a capacity for ‘mindreading’, ‘mentalizing’ or ‘mind attribution’ as it is also known in psychology, is an important means of accounting for the way in which characters and narrators infer one another’s

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beliefs, intentions and feelings in texts, and the way in which these minds are understood, in turn, by readers. As Palmer argues, cognitively informed perspectives on fictional minds present the analyst with the ‘need to look more closely at the sets of instructions that relate to mental functioning in fictional texts’ (2004: 12). Through his concept of ‘embedded narratives’ (2004: 184), Palmer seeks to capture the range of linguistic cues scattered across a text that readers integrate in the construction of fictional minds. These textual cues include ‘the whole of a character’s mind in action’:  not only their perceptions, ideologies, cognitive habits, emotions, motivations, memories of the past and plans for the future but also their speech, actions and behaviour (2004: 183–94). Herman is similarly concerned with analysing the dynamic operations undergone by readers in ‘building models of characters’ minds’ and the ‘different (but interrelated) kinds of information about consciousness’ involved (2007:  245, 251). In describing these text-level processes, the study of fictional consciousness blurs into the study of characterization (Culpeper 2001). The two are closely related and, as Palmer suggests, perhaps best considered together ‘under the wider heading of mind’ (2004: 58; see also Stockwell 2009: 131). This developing understanding of fictional minds in cognitive narratology invites an ongoing reevaluation of the phenomena represented by mind style and new textual features for inclusion in its analysis. A  risk faced in such cognitive narratological approaches, however, is that of losing sight of the linguistic grounding of stylistic analysis in the rush to apply cognitive insights (Gavins and Stockwell 2012; Rundquist 2014). For Rundquist (2014: 161), ‘some advocates of the “cognitive turn” in narratology seem to embrace it largely at the expense of the “linguistic turn” that came before’. In particular, Rundquist views the analysis of fictional minds in terms of real minds seen in the work of Palmer and Herman as ‘deprioritizing the mechanics and effects of linguistic variations in their textual construction’. What is needed, Rundquist argues (2014: 161), is an approach that integrates existing narratological research into consciousness representation as part of an emerging cognitive paradigm. Through its identification of connections between linguistic forms and our wider embodied experiences of the world (including the other minds we encounter within it), CG offers an effective framework for engaging with such extended understandings of fictional consciousness while retaining a firm focus on the linguistic choices employed in individual texts. As I shall argue in Chapter 6, this involves accounting for both the range of textual cues highlighted by cognitive narratologists in accordance with realworld minds, alongside the specific forms of consciousness representation which we encounter in literature.

2.6 Experiences of mind style As I described in Section 1.2, a cognitive stylistic approach to mind style considers the reader mind in which the ‘impression’ of a worldview arises (Fowler 1977: 76). This concern is one which arguably underpins (if sometimes implicitly) all the discussions

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of mind style described so far in this book. In concluding her review of mind style, Semino (2007) states: I should also spell out that the concepts of ‘mind’, ‘mental functioning’, and ‘world view’ all refer to constructs that readers produce in the process of interpretation: we attribute minds and world views to characters, and we construct and monitor the functioning of these minds as we read a story or novel. All this happens as a result of the processing of linguistic choices and patterns in texts. (p. 170)

The cognitive processing of language that underpins readers’ interpretations of texts is the focus of this book. For the remainder of this section I argue that the ways in which mind styles are recognized and attributed by readers, and their affective, aesthetic and ethical experiences during reading, merit closer attention using a cognitive grammatical approach. First, the recognition of a mind style, and the decisions made in its attribution to a shared ideology or idiosyncratic cognitive habit (Semino and Swindlehurst 1996), and genuine cognitive trait or rhetorical strategy (McIntyre 2005), relies on a degree of perceived deviation, and an interpretation of its origin. As Fowler emphasizes, such deviation is necessarily contextualized relative to the mind of the reader and their sociohistorical context: A crude contrast of normal versus abnormal does not completely explain the particular impact of a specific text [. . .] It is situated historically and socially, as well as cognitively, in relation to the dispositions of the human mind. (1996: 227)

In addition, attention to reader minds is necessary for discussion of the set of feelings and judgements evoked in readers through mind style. The interaction between reader minds and fictional minds gives rise to a range of experiences of characters and texts more broadly. In their empirical study of reader responses, Miall and Kuiken (1994, 2002; Kuiken Miall and Sikora 2004) outline four types of ‘feelings’ evoked in readers of literary narrative, defined as ‘the bodily sense, within awareness, of all experienced affect, including emotions, moods, and attitudes’ (Kuiken et al. 2004: 174). Such responses include: ‘evaluative feelings’ (e.g. pleasure or enjoyment) in response to the text as a whole; ‘narrative feelings’ (e.g. sympathy or empathy) in response to the characters, events or fictional world; ‘aesthetic feelings’ (e.g. interest or intrigue) in response to formal features of the text; and finally ‘self-modifying feelings’ which arise under certain conditions and impact the reader’s sense of self. Particularly significant for discussions of mind style are the ‘narrative feelings’ evoked in relation to the characters and their situation in the fictional world. The presentation of a distinctive worldview can be seen to contribute to the experience of transportation, or the reader’s sense of immersion in the fictional world (Gerrig 1993; Green and Brock 2000; Ryan 2001; Gerrig and Rapp 2004; Green 2004). Closely related to transportation are experiences of ‘empathy’ and ‘sympathy’ in relation to the characters within this world. Such notions often emerge in readers’ discourse

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about their experiences of literary characters (Stockwell 2005: 144). The relationships described by these terms, however, have been variably defined and related across multiple disciplines. Empathy describes the psychological process by which we vicariously share the cognitive and emotional experiences of another person or character (Hodges and Wegner 1997; Keen 2006, 2007; Sklar 2013). This kind of engagement or ‘feeling with’ a character is often distinguished from sympathy, or ‘feeling for’ a character  – an experience similar to that of a witness or spectator (Oatley and Gholamain 1997: 270; Keen 2006: 209; Oatley 2011: 118). In Sklar’s (2013: 56) account, sympathy is distinguished from empathy through a sense of ‘distance’, which allows a judgement of the character on the part of the reader or viewer. Taking this further the two can be seen as differing in terms of an experiential sense of closeness or distance in relation to a character (Bray 2007: 60; Stockwell 2009: 56). Empathy and sympathy seem to be likely effects of mind style upon readers. In stylistics and narratology, it has often been asserted that forms of internal narrative point of view, and the mental access they provide, are an effective means of promoting empathy or sympathy (Stanzel 1979:  173; Booth 1987; Leech and Short 2007:  221; Sklar 2013: 49–52). Empirical work on this subject has provided a degree of support for such claims (Andringa 1996; van Peer and Pander Maat 1996, 2001; Gerrig and Rapp 2004). However, researchers emphasize the multitude of interacting textual and contextual (including psychological) factors that influence reader responses alongside point of view (van Peer and Pander Maat 2001: 231–2; see also Keen 2006; Bray 2007). These include the degree of identification or self-implication experienced by a reader towards a character (Oatley and Gholamain 1997; Andringa 2004; Kuiken et al. 2004; Whiteley 2011) or the ‘recognition in text-world characters of aspects of the reader’s own self-aware personality’ (Stockwell 2009: 138). Equally, our ethical judgements of characters and situations are again likely to interact and conflict with our empathetic relationships in complex ways (Phelan 1996, 2005, 2007; Whiteley 2014; Nuttall 2015). These reader experiences are of further interest for this study due to the connections which are often made with the cognitive scientific concept of mental simulation. Inspired by recent developments in psychology and neuroscience, empathy in particular is often understood as a process of ‘simulation’ involving the activation of ‘mirror neurons’ (Oatley and Gholamain 1997; Keen 2007; Oatley 2008, 2009, 2011; Sanford and Emmott 2012). In Stockwell’s (2009: 56) account, empathy and sympathy are an extension of the embodied simulation of physical, cognitive and emotional ‘sensations’ during reading, distinguished by their social nature in relation to another consciousness. As described in Section 2.5, the concept of mental simulation also underlies the simulation theory of mind attribution, in which we understand other minds by simulating their mental states. However, while mind attribution and empathy are often treated as synonymous within the literature on this subject, the two can be distinguished on a phenomenological and neurological basis. As Singer (2006:  856) observes, ‘sharing the grief of a close friend feels fundamentally different than understanding what this person is having as thoughts and intentions, the latter lacking a bodily sensation’ (see also Keen 2006). However, while arguing that ‘the capacity to

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mentalize and to empathize are distinct and rely on different neuro-cognitive circuits’ (2006: 856), Singer goes on to suggest that the two are nonetheless intertwined aspects of the multilayered process we refer to as empathy, or ‘different levels of empathic responding’ (p.  860). The suggestion of a common basis for empathy and mind attribution in simulations of experience, and neurological evidence for a relationship between the two processes within social cognition (Shamay-Tsoory et al. 2003; Decety and Lamm 2007; Hooker et al. 2008; Kerr 2008; Schnell et al. 2011), suggests that our recognition and understanding of other minds is closely related to our experience of empathy. Furthermore, as will be discussed in Chapter 3, in light of cognitive linguistic research, our comprehension of language more broadly can be seen to involve a mental simulation of the actions and perceptions described. Although the cognitive mechanics underpinning mind attribution and empathy are still under debate, based on these converging narratological, psychological and linguistic accounts, I suggest that mind style, or the attribution of a mind to a character based on their linguistic choices, inevitably invites a degree of empathy in readers. Along similar lines, Gavins (2007) argues: The inclusion of enactors in a text-world always results, to varying degrees of intensity, in an empathetic identification on the part of the discourse-world participants. The relative positivity or negativity of that reaction depends to a great extent on the manner in which relationships between enactors and their textworld environment is presented by the text. (p. 64)

While a mind style arguably ‘always’ invites an empathetic engagement of some kind, the ‘intensity’ and valence of this reader experience will vary according to the nature of the mind being presented, and the knowledge, beliefs and attentional dispositions of the individual reader (see also Whiteley 2014). The texts I have chosen to consider in Chapters 4 to 7 feature mind styles for which this resulting experience is often an uncomfortable or negative one. The cognitive mechanics of this experience will be developed using CG and text world theory in the following chapter. In cognitive stylistics, experiential aspects of reading are increasingly highlighted alongside processes of meaning construction. Far from being subsidiary elements, such ‘feelings’ have been shown in empirical studies to have significant consequences for readers’ comprehension of literary texts (Miall and Kuiken 1994, 2002; Miall 2005: 149; Oatley 2011:  67–8). Sanford and Emmott (2012:  191) apply the term ‘hot cognition’ to refer to ‘the way emotion and feeling interact with cognitive activities, that is how cognition is coloured and modified by feelings’. One way in which feelings affect cognition is modelled by Miall and Kuiken (1994) in terms of a process of refamiliarization, whereby the feeling of defamiliarization evoked by foregrounded linguistic choices such as mind style guides readers’ attentional processing and resulting interpretation of the text. Furthermore, experiential relationships with fictional characters can also affect readers’ understanding of themselves. Kuiken, Miall and Sikora (2004:  175) identify self-modifying feelings as feelings that restructure a reader’s sense of self. Such modification may take two forms in their account: readers may ‘recognize’ aspects of their experiences or identity, or ‘realize’ something new about themselves.

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Accounts of the self-modification invited through engagement with other minds can be found in other cognitive stylistic and narratological accounts. Applications of schema theory to literature, such as that of Cook (1994) and Semino (1997, 2002, 2007), provide a model of the cognitive effects of such engagement in terms of schema reinforcement and schema refreshment. Semino extends Cook’s (1994) psychological account of defamiliarization to include a range of subtle effects upon reader minds: not only schema change, but also less dramatic and less permanent experiences, such as connecting normally separate schemata in unusual ways in the processing of a particular text, becoming aware of one’s own schematic assumptions, questioning the validity of one’s schemata in the light of new experiences and so on. (Semino 1997: 251)

In Margolin’s (2003: 278) account, the representation of deviant, unfamiliar minds in fiction is said to be ‘a powerful cognitive tool which may make us aware of actual cognitive mechanisms, and, more specifically, of our own mental functioning’. Engagement with fictional minds may serve to make us aware of the ‘normal’ mechanisms against which our judgements of other minds are measured. In this sense, Margolin (2003:  285) argues, our experience of the minds encountered in narrative is both driven by and a contribution to our folk psychology. Echoing the distinction between schema reinforcement and schema refreshment, such an engagement is said to have both a ‘self-validating’ effect in relation to our own worldviews (Leahy 2005; Stockwell 2009:  132), and an enriching or enlarging effect upon our sense of other minds. Similarly, Herman (2013: 74) argues that the situations presented in narrative provide the ‘conceptual primitives’ through which we categorize individuals in real life and fiction, including our fundamental category of a ‘person’ (Herman 2013: 78, 199). It is these kinds of felt effects and consequences for mind style which I will explore in relation to the strange or nonhuman characters encountered in speculative fiction. As Hoover (2016) argues, mind style is most usefully analysed in texts in which the conceptual structures or cognitive habits suggested contribute in some significant way to our interpretation. Therefore, in this book I aim to not only describe the mind styles presented in the texts I consider, but also to explore their significance for readers’ overall experiences of the novels.

2.7 Conclusion Mind style is a rich and varied phenomenon in literary discourse, and one that can draw upon any aspect of language for its effects. However, as we have seen in this chapter, from an analytical perspective, the concept of mind style is not without its problems. Theoretical and practical issues associated with its analysis include its situation within a broader model of narrative point of view, and the distinctions made in its attribution:  to an individual mind as opposed to a shared ideological point of view, and to a cognitive habit or rhetorical strategy. The discussion of mind style in this chapter has defined it in cognitive stylistic terms: as an experiential effect

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during reading, or an interaction between style and reader. Viewing mind style in such a reception-oriented manner, rather than as a writerly technique, has offered a means of clarifying its definition. Further, it has raised to attention a number of other questions concerning the way in which this textual effect is recognized, attributed and experienced as part of our wider engagement with characters and a fictional world. In the analyses that follow, it is the readers of the novels, as opposed to their writers, that I look to for insights into the workings of this effect. Questions also surround the kinds of texts to which mind style can be usefully applied. Contrary to its application by Fowler (1996 [1986]) and Leech and Short (2007 [1981]), recent discussion of this effect has tended to be in relation to highly unorthodox minds, or those characterized by unusual psychological traits. However, this restricted application risks losing some of the critical and interpretative value of the original concept. A fine-grained analysis of the cognitive structures and processes suggested by particular linguistic choices may offer a richer explanation of the individual mental selves we detect in this way, and their variable relation to our own everyday cognition. Fowler’s concept of mind style arose out of an embodied view of language as reflecting the ways in which we perceive and structure our reality. Sharing this view, cognitive linguistic frameworks are highly compatible with the discussion of mind style. Here I have suggested that CG offers a framework for the stylistic application of concepts and ideas from the cognitive sciences, such as mind attribution, empathy and simulation, which maps these processes to specific linguistic choices in texts. This argument will be developed in the following chapter, in which I  introduce the basic principles and key concepts of this framework and explore its relationship with comparable discourse frameworks in stylistics.

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Cognitive grammar

3.1 Introduction Cognitive grammar is a richly detailed account of language and mind, set out in the work of Ronald Langacker (1987, 1991) and progressively refined through a series of handbooks (2002, 2008, 2013). This chapter further distils this framework as an analytical basis for the investigation of mind style. First, in Section 3.2 I briefly establish the context for this approach in cognitive linguistics, including the core principles of this field of linguistic research. In Sections 3.3 to 3.5 I introduce some key concepts in CG and their existing applications to literature, before setting out CG’s account of discourse in Section 3.6. In order to explore this discourse-level application, it is helpful to compare CG with established discourse frameworks. In the final two sections of this chapter, I discuss CG’s relationship with systemic-functional grammar and text world theory. Lastly, drawing on recent advances in text world theory’s discussion of prose fiction, I outline an adapted model of CG for the analysis of worlds and worldviews.

3.2 Cognitive linguistics The field of cognitive linguistics in which CG is situated is best characterized not as a single, unified theory of language, but ‘rather a cluster of broadly compatible approaches’ (Geeraerts and Cuykens 2007:  3). These approaches share a number of core commitments and principles, the most basic of which are summarized by Lakoff (1990: 40): ●

●

the Generalization Commitment – ‘a commitment to characterising the general principles governing all aspects of human language’; the Cognitive Commitment – ‘a commitment to make one’s account of language accord with what is generally known about the mind and the brain, from other disciplines as well as our own’.

According to cognitive linguists, all aspects of language can be explained in terms of basic cognitive principles – and this applies as much to discourse as it does to lexis, syntax and phonology. Indeed, cognitive linguistic accounts do not usually make these

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language-level distinctions, and instead treat these simply as ‘units’ of different sizes. In explaining these principles, cognitive linguists draw on understandings of cognition developed or corroborated in psychology and neuroscience. Fundamentally, language is not regarded as a separate mental faculty, but rather as an integral part of our general cognition. In cognitive linguistics, cognition is held to be embodied, or grounded in our bodily experiences of the world and the sociocultural contexts in which these occur. Consequently, cognitive linguists reject an ‘objectivist’ view of reality in favour of an experiential realism (Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1987), which views perceived reality as construed relative to our individual and collective selves. In this view, our bodies constrain not only our perception of reality but also how we express this reality in language. From a cognitive linguistic perspective, therefore, patterns in language use such as those contributing to mind style are the result of individual or shared constraints within our cognitive capabilities, sensory experiences and wider physical and social environment. Crucially, while embodiment makes certain linguistic choices more likely and appear more normal, or well-formed, our capacity for alternate construals (Langacker 2008) reflects the choices we each make in representing these embodied experiences. In their introduction to cognitive linguistics, Evans and Green (2006) divide the field into two sets of approaches:  ‘cognitive semantics’ and ‘cognitive approaches to grammar’. Work in cognitive semantics focuses upon the structures and processes that together make up meaning in terms of conceptualization. Key to this account of meaning are the view of our linguistic/world knowledge as encyclopaedic and organized within frames, idealized cognitive models, domains or schemata (Rumelhart 1980; Fillmore 1982; Lakoff 1987; Langacker 1987); structured by our bodily experiences in the form of image schemas (Johnson 1987), force dynamics (Talmy 1988, 2000a) and mental simulations (Barsalou 1999); and used to form meaning through conceptual metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff and Turner 1989) and conceptual integration or the blending of mental spaces (Fauconnier 1994, 1997; Fauconnier and Turner 2002). Broadly speaking, it is the study of ‘the nature and organisation of mental representation in all its richness and diversity’ (Evans and Green 2006: 156). Cognitive approaches to grammar, on the other hand, are primarily concerned with the linguistic structures or ‘units’ which comprise language. These include Langacker’s (1987, 1991, 2008) CG and a range of construction grammars (Goldberg 1995; Kay and Fillmore 1999; Croft 2001; Bergen and Chang 2005). These approaches share a view of language as an inventory of ‘units’ or constructions, which are stored in memory, and emphasize the role of these constructions in grammar as opposed to rules. Langacker’s model, however, can be distinguished through its greater attention to the cognitive mechanisms which underpin the formation and use of constructions, rather than constructions themselves (Evans and Green 2006: 481). In this sense, it lies somewhere in between cognitive semantics and cognitive approaches to grammar. This model’s attention to the mechanisms involved in construal (discussed later in this chapter) makes this account particularly useful for the analysis of literature. These two sets of approaches in cognitive linguistics are closely linked. As Evans and Green (2006: 48) state, ‘a cognitive grammar assumes a cognitive semantics and

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is dependent upon it’. Specifically, the concepts arising in cognitive semantic research provide CG with an account of linguistic meaning as residing in ‘conceptualisation, which is dynamic, interactive, imagistic (as opposed to propositional), and imaginative (involving metaphor, blending, fictivity, and mental space construction)’ (Langacker 2008:  43). CG builds on this account of meaning by drawing connections between these conceptual structures/processes and the grammatical structures observed in language. By developing the linguistic side of the relationship between language and conceptualization, this framework offers a basis for close linguistic analysis in cognitive stylistics. In the following sections I  outline three key concepts within CG as set out in Langacker’s recent book-length introduction, Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction (2008).1 These are ‘linguistic units’, ‘construal’ and ‘simulation’, each of which can be usefully applied in the analysis of literary discourse. Where appropriate, I  explore the overlaps between this framework and other approaches in cognitive linguistics, including the cognitive semantic concepts mentioned so far.

3.3 Linguistic units CG makes the fundamental claim that ‘grammar is meaningful’ (Langacker 2008: 3). Language, in this model, is made up of meaningful components termed symbolic structures, which consist of a phonological and a semantic structure, connected in a form–meaning pairing (2008:  15). Grammar consists of the patterns through which such structures are combined to form constructions, or symbolic assemblies, of increasing size and complexity. Through a number of usage events, or instances of use in context (2008:  220), a construction undergoes psychological processes of entrenchment, involving the progressive reinforcement of a cognitive routine, and schematization, involving the abstraction of common elements, until it achieves unit status (2008: 17). These processes give rise to the ‘structured inventory’ of conventional linguistic units (2008: 222), which provides the resources for expression within a given speech community. As less effort is required to express an idea if it can be related to an existing unit, such forms facilitate or ‘sanction’ expression along these conventionalized lines and function as ‘templates’ for the construction and interpretation of new linguistic expressions (Langacker 2008:  215, 220). By providing a measure of well-formedness against which instantiations are judged (2008: 231), conventional linguistic units thus form the basis for our ‘readerly intuitions’ in relation to novel or poetic uses of language (Stockwell 2002: 60; Hamilton 2003: 56), or the extent to which a word or grammatical structure appears an appropriate or ‘normal’ means of representing our experiences. It is by deviating from the entrenched, schematic cognitive routines represented by linguistic units that literature may have its defamiliarizing effect. Linguistic units consist of multiple component structures that are conceptually integrated (in Fauconnier and Turner’s [2002] sense) to form a higher-level composite structure (2008: 162, 528). Drawing on Fauconnier and Turner’s account, CG describes the way in which we build up these structures during language use as part of their

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meaning. For Langacker, the compositional path followed in reaching this structure is ‘a secondary but significant aspect of an expression’s form and meaning’ (2008: 167). The extent to which this compositional path contributes to an expression’s meaning varies between instances. Constructions can be positioned along a scale of analyzability, which describes how salient the parts are relative to the whole (Langacker 2008: 61). For conventional linguistic units with familiar and entrenched composite structures (e.g. the idiom it’s raining cats and dogs), it may not be necessary to separately mentally access the individual component structures one by one. In such cases, often the focus of construction grammars (e.g. Goldberg 1995), the wholesale retrieval of these structures from memory means that ‘viewing a construction in terms of the “order” in which it is “built” is rather meaningless’ (Evans and Green 2006: 589). Alternatively, in novel (or ‘fully analyzable’) constructions such as the foregrounded language often employed by literary writers, the component elements are more likely to be individually accessed as part of the construction of meaning (Langacker 2008: 62). Harrison (2017) applies the concepts of composite structure and compositional path to the conceptualization of a fictional world along a ‘reading path’. She describes reading as ‘a process which requires the sequential assembly of building blocks to create the fictional world of a text’ (2017: 114). However, Langacker warns against taking the ‘building-block metaphor’ underlying terms such as ‘composition’ and ‘construction’ too literally: While component structures serve to evoke a composite structure, and provide a way of apprehending it, the latter should not be thought of – in any strict or literal sense – as being constructed out of them. Stepping stones are not the same as building blocks. (2008: 166)

More broadly, the relationship between ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ aspects of processing, or between compositionality and conventionality within language, represents an open issue within CG. For Broccias and Hollmann (2007), CG’s theorybased claims that all linguistic forms are meaningful conflicts with a usage-based recognition of the extensive role of entrenched memory structures in everyday language use (see also Taylor 2003: 652–3). The relationship between linguistic structures and prior knowledge during online processing is a question yet to be answered by CG (Langacker 2008: 418) This issue has implications for the stylistic application of CG to discourse. As Stockwell (2010) observes, the difficulty in describing the interaction between ‘topdown’ and ‘bottom-up’ processing during reading presents an ongoing challenge for cognitive stylistics: When it comes to stylistic analysis at the textual level, there is a curious blind spot in the middle of the application of cognitive linguistics. Taking its cue from cognitive psychology, cognitive linguistics has adopted a top-down approach to schematisation and world-building from above, and a bottom-up approach to grammar as an assembly of constructions from below. The problem for the

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stylistician interested in textuality and discourse is that these two perspectives do not meet up seamlessly in the middle. (p. 425)

The interaction between grammatical choices and reader knowledge within fictional world construction represents a key question for this research. This interaction will be explored from both directions in my textual analyses in Chapters 4 and 5. Viewed together, these chapters scrutinize this ‘blind spot’ and outline a bridge between the two perspectives within CG.

3.4 Construal The combination of meaningful structures activated by an expression is just half of the story. Of equal importance is the way in which this content is construed. Construal describes our ‘ability to conceive and portray the same situation in alternate ways’ (Langacker 2008: 43), and applies to all encounters with language, including that of a writer, who makes choices in coding his or her conceptualization, and a reader, who conceives this meaning based on these linguistic cues. In CG, our linguistic construal of a situation draws upon the same cognitive mechanisms involved in perception, and so is described using a visual metaphor2: In viewing a scene, what we actually see depends on how closely we examine it, what we choose to look at, which elements we pay most attention to, and where we view it from. The corresponding labels I will use, for broad classes of construal phenomena, are specificity, focusing, prominence, and perspective. They apply to conceptions in any domain. (Langacker 2008: 55, original emphasis)

Langacker’s classification of construal dimensions is one of a number in cognitive linguistics. Comparable models are found in Talmy’s (2000a, 2000b) ‘conceptual structuring systems’ and Croft and Cruse’s (2004) ‘construal phenomena’. These overlap with Langacker’s classification to a significant extent, but differ in the way in which the basic processes are divided or grouped. For Verhagen (2007: 55), any classification of construal phenomena is arbitrary to some extent, since the various dimensions tend to overlap within the meanings of linguistic expressions.3 Applications of construal to discourse, therefore, tend to apply such classifications flexibly and eclectically according to their analytical aims (e.g. Herman 2009a; Hart 2013; Harrison 2017). In this section, I outline several dimensions of construal which are useful for the analysis of mind style. At a basic level, a construal involves the relationship between a conceptualizer and a conceptualization, or the conceived situation evoked by a linguistic expression, in what Langacker (2008: 73) terms a viewing arrangement. In Verhagen’s (2007: 58) framework, this arrangement is represented diagrammatically as a construal configuration, as seen in Figure 3.1. Notably, Verhagen’s (2007: 59) development of the viewing arrangement emphasizes the fact that there are typically at least two conceptualizers involved in

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Figure 3.1. The construal configuration (adapted from Verhagen 2007: 60).

language use, and thus accommodates our ability ‘to take into account other minds in relation to an object of conceptualization’ as part of a construal. Following Verhagen (2007), different dimensions of construal can be identified with different aspects of this configuration. Specificity, focusing, prominence, dynamicity and action chains involve the structuring of the conceived situation; and its component elements – or the uppermost horizontal level of Figure 3.1, Perspective, on the other hand – pertain to the structuring of the vertical relationship between this content and its conceptualizers. Construal represents the most richly applied aspect of CG to discourse in existing research (e.g. Harrison et al. 2014). The notion of multiple construals of experience is far from new in stylistics and is in fact central to the very concept of mind style (see Section 2.2). What is new is the level of detail with which construal is defined in CG and the systematic framework it offers for analysis. The following sections discuss the different dimensions of construal one by one.

Specificity The first dimension of construal that I  shall outline here (at the upper horizontal level of Figure 3.1) pertains to the level of ‘precision and detail’ or ‘granularity’ with which the situation is conceived (Langacker 2008: 55). The alternative linguistic units available within a language for describing the same situation can be arranged in taxonomic hierarchies reflecting an increasing degree of specificity. Taking an example from Under the Skin, discussed in Section 1.1, we can see that the ‘fleshy biped with its arm extended’ described by the character Isserley (Faber 2000: 3) represents a highly specific construal from a range of possible linguistic options: living thing > human being > adult > hitch-hiker > a fleshy biped with its arm extended

The degree of specificity with which writers, narrators and characters construe a situation has consequences for our impressions of them. While a yet more specific

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construal is conceivable (e.g. the fleshy biped with its arm extended and its spine in upright position), Isserley’s construal already seems unusually specific, with the linguistic unit ‘hitch-hiker’ being a more conventional option. Harrison (2017:  87) notes that the ‘resolution’ of a description of a fictional world impacts upon the way in which readers fill in the gaps by drawing on their prior knowledge. As indicated by the example here, a construal which is of greater or lesser specificity than that which is conventional can disrupt this activation of knowledge in readers, and the understanding which results.

Focusing CG describes lexical choices as providing points of access to a ‘matrix’ of knowledge structures called domains (Langacker 2008:  44). Roughly equivalent to concepts of frames (Fillmore 1982), idealized cognitive models (Lakoff 1987) and schemata (Bartlett 1932), domains contain knowledge relating to any area of experience, whether linguistic or paralinguistic, perceptual, physical, cultural, etc., which together form the open-ended background for our understanding of linguistic expressions. In CG, the variable access to such knowledge provided by linguistic choices forms a key dimension of construal, which Langacker terms focusing (2008:  57). For example, the differential activation of the domains FOOD and HUMAN BODY for the words meat and flesh contributes to significantly different meanings despite their shared content (Croft and Cruse 2004:  18). In addition to such differences in domain activation, linguistic choices vary in the scope of access to any given domain (Langacker 2008:  62). Comparable to the restricted viewing frame experienced in perception, this scope is divisible into background and foreground: the maximal scope that reflects an expression’s entire coverage within background knowledge, and the minimal scope which reflects the portion that is foregrounded or metaphorically placed ‘onstage’ (2008: 65). A word such as thighs, for example, is understood in relation to an immediate scope of LEG, which is itself understood against the maximal scope of an accessed matrix of domains, likely to include HUMAN BODY, along with knowledge of those thighs (e.g. chicken) sold as FOOD. CG’s discussion of focusing in terms of foreground and background, or minimal and maximal scope, sets this model apart from other comparable cognitive linguistic models of meaning (see Evans and Green 2006: 231), and can be usefully applied to literary texts (Giovanelli 2014; Pleyer and Schneider 2014). In the opening pages of Under the Skin, Isserley’s use of the word ‘thigh’ (Faber 2000: 4) when describing the hitch-hikers she later consumes, might be seen to focus knowledge of FOOD in the background during reading, in a way which subtly primes us for the novel’s later, horrifying, revelation. The application of this concept to mind style, along with specificity described previously, will be developed in Chapter 5.

Prominence The asymmetrical relationship between foreground and background is regarded in CG as a basic feature of language and cognition. This relationship is seen most clearly in the well-attested phenomenon of figure and ground within Gestalt psychology, or

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the tendency in perception for certain elements to ‘stand out’ against the background of the visual field (Ungerer and Schmidt 2006:  163–206). In CG, this psychological phenomenon is identified at multiple levels of linguistic structure. This includes the focusing of knowledge domains discussed in the previous section, and the directing of attention to specific prominent entities within this focused content. The immediate scope of a linguistic expression functions as the base within which an entity or referent is singled out for attention (its profile) (Langacker 2008:  66). The different profiles singled out by linguistic expressions serve as the basis for their division into grammatical classes in CG. These different kinds of profiles, and the abstract, experientially grounded image schemas they instantiate (Johnson 1987; Hampe and Grady 2005), are represented in Figure 3.2. First, linguistic forms may profile either a thing or a relationship (2008:  67). Taking another example from Under the Skin (Faber 2000: 1) a noun such as ‘hitcher’ in (a)  below profiles an entity within our conceptualization. When a relationship is profiled, for example, by a preposition such as ‘on’, a second type of prominence, a trajector/landmark alignment, is observed among its participant entities (2008:  70). Parallel to figure and ground in perception, this distinction is syntactic, and can

Figure 3.2. Grammatical classes and their profiles (adapted from Langacker 1987: 249).

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be aligned with the concepts of subject and object in most grammars. This distinction accounts for the difference of meaning between (a) and my reconstrual in (b), which profile the same relationship, but differ through their contrasting choice of subject, or trajector: the primary focal participant being assessed in relation to the landmark in the ground. While this relationship is static, or atemporal, in (a) and (b), the profiled process in (c)  includes a conceptualization of the changing relationship between trajector and landmark through time: a. A lone hitcher (tr) on a country road (lm) b. A country road (tr) beneath a lone hitcher (lm) c. A lone hitcher (tr) walked along a country road (lm) While the examples above feature one figure profiled against a single ground, Langacker proposes a scalar model of figure and ground in which several ‘local’ foci of attention may vary by degrees of prominence (1987: 188). Within the situation profiled by an expression (e.g. A lone hitcher on a country road in the Highlands of Scotland) the trajector and any number of landmarks are said to form a cline of prominence as part of a graded background (Ungerer and Schmidt 2006: 186). In CG, certain types of entities are said to hold an inherent ‘cognitive salience’ (Langacker 1991: 296; 1993: 324). This can be related to the principles determining our perception of figures within Gestalt psychology (Stockwell 2002; Wagemans et al. 2012), which include: wholes (as opposed to their parts); physical entities (as opposed to abstract entities); new/informative entities (as opposed to previously encountered ones); directly experienced entities (as opposed to those accessed through other modalities); definite entities (as opposed to indefinite or unspecified ones); active entities (as opposed to static ones) and entities that are basically like us, or which possess empathetic recognizability (Langacker 2008: 66). Such figural entities are good candidates for the role of trajector in a profiled relationship (or the subject of a clause) as part of a prototypical construal. In the examples above, the ‘lone hitcher’ is more well defined than the unmodified ‘country road’, is active (in [c], and by inference in [a] and [b]) and is more empathetically recognizable as a fellow human being. It is due to such experientially grounded factors that a psychological sense of ‘well-formedness’ is likely to be felt for (a) and, in contrast, a subtle sense of deviation for (b). This example illustrates suggestions made in CG as to the prototypical, canonical or default structuring of conceived situations on the basis of our embodied condition. By accounting for the construals that are conventional within a given speech community on the basis of such prototypes, it thus provides a foundation for describing the embodied effects of construals encountered in literature. Isserley’s construal of the hitcher in Under the Skin is prototypical in this embodied sense, and so her suggestion that ‘You’d think a lone hitcher on a country road would stand out a mile’ (Faber 2000: 1) is easy for us to identify with as her narratee. This CG account of prominence can also help explain our responses to unconventional construals. Stockwell (2002:  60–70), for example, applies the notion that ‘certain arrangements of subjects in expressions seem cognitively more “natural” than others’ (2002: 61) as a means of accounting for ‘intuited effects of deviation’ during literary reading. Similarly, in Hamilton’s (2003)

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analysis of ‘Hospital Barge’ by Wilfred Owen, deviation from a ‘canonical viewing arrangement’ is modelled as a source of poetic diction, and an invitation to adopt a distinctive perspective on a scene. Clear links can be drawn between this CG account and the stylistic notion of ‘prominence’ as the result of linguistic deviation, described in Section 2.4. Instances of foregrounding in texts can often be explained in terms of a writer’s manipulation of profiling and trajector/landmark alignment (Hamilton 2003; Harrison 2014; Neary 2014). In the other direction, stylistic accounts of foregrounding also offer insights for CG. Langacker’s (1993:  324) open-ended list of ‘various kinds of prominence’ could clearly benefit from the rich tradition of stylistic research which has explored techniques at various levels of linguistic structure which contribute to foregrounding (e.g. Leech and Short 2007), and which has repeatedly tested such claims using empirical methods (van Peer 1986; Miall and Kuiken 1994; Sanford and Emmott 2012). Second, discussion of prominence as part of a cognitive stylistic approach emphasizes the reader mind which engages with such textual cues, or the fact that prominence is variable and, following Oakley (2009), subject to the attentional dispositions of individual language users (Stockwell 2009: 44–6). These enrichments of Langacker’s concept, and its application to mind style, will be developed in Chapter 4.

Dynamicity In CG, conceptualization is ‘inherently dynamic’ – ‘it resides in mental processing (or neurological activity) and therefore occurs through time’ (Langacker 2008:  79). CG models this mental processing in terms of scanning, or a shifting of attention between stimuli. Dynamicity describes the ways in which the conceived situation unfolds during processing time through such scanning. First, distinct construals of a scene arise from differences in the order in which components are mentally accessed. The description seen in (d)  is again taken from Under the Skin (Faber 2000: 2), as Isserley describes the rural landscape she sees as she drives. Though describing the same landscape, my reconstrual of this same content in (e) can be said in CG to be semantically nonequivalent (Langacker 2008: 81): d. A luminous moat of rainwater, a swarm of gulls following a seeder around a loamy field, a glimpse of rain two or three mountains away [. . .] e. A glimpse of rain two or three mountains away, a swarm of gulls following a seeder around a loamy field, a luminous moat of rainwater [. . .] Here, distinct conceptual experiences result from a difference in the direction of mental scanning, or the path along which a reader is invited to attend to this fictional world by ‘zooming out’ and ‘zooming in’, respectively (Langacker 2008: 81–2). Related to the concept of a compositional path (see Section 3.3), this path of access, or the sequence in which we activate a whole via its parts, is said to contribute to the meaning of such descriptions. The manner of unfolding may differ not only in direction, but also in the type of scanning adopted. CG differentiates two types of scanning, available to us in the

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construal of a situation. Summary scanning examines multiple entities in a cumulative manner, building up a group or ‘gestalt’ which can then be apprehended simultaneously as a unified whole (Langacker 2008:  107). Sequential scanning, on the other hand, examines individual ‘states’ (or the relationship between entities at any given moment) one by one, with each state fading from attention as the subsequent one is apprehended (2008: 111). The distinction between these two types of processing forms the schematic basis for the distinction between atemporal relationships and processes represented in Figure 3.2. While we use summary scanning to profile ‘things’ (e.g. a lone hitcher) and ‘atemporal relationships’ (e.g. a lone hitcher on a country road), the ‘process’ profiled by a verb (e.g. walked) is processed using sequential scanning. However, any profiled content may be construed in either fashion (holistically or dynamically) dependent on the kind of scanning invited by its linguistic description. While the situation seen earlier in (c), is conceived using sequential scanning (as represented in Figure 3.3, part a), in an alternative construal, a lone hitcher’s journey along a country road, the various positions of this trajector along its path are progressively summed to form a single gestalt which is conceived holistically (Figure 3.3, part b). Langacker specifies a significant role of scanning in what he terms a reference point relationship. In CG, everyday utterances reveal a tendency to locate one entity in terms of another. For example, while driving, it might not be surprising to hear the following:  Do you remember that hitch-hiker we passed? I think the turn-off was just before. Such uses of language are said to reflect our basic cognitive ability to ‘invoke

Figure 3.3. Sequential and summary scanning (adapted from Langacker 1987: 245).

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Figure 3.4. A reference point relationship (based on Langacker 2008: 84).

the conception of one entity in order to establish “mental contact” with another’ (Langacker 2008: 83–4). In this conceptual process, shown in Figure 3.4, the profile of a linguistic unit is a reference point that affords access to multiple targets, or mentally accessible entities, which collectively make up its dominion. The relationship between reference point and target is modelled as a form of sequential scanning, involving a shift of focus between entities through processing time. Conceived as ‘an idealised cognitive model considered fundamental to our mental experience’ (Langacker 1991: 173), this scanning model offers a broader account of the ways in which we locate aspects of relevant knowledge along a mental path, starting from the initial point of access offered by a linguistic expression. A number of researchers have applied the concepts of summary and sequential scanning to discuss the dynamic process of literary reading (Tabakowska 1993; Wojick-Leese 2000; Giovanelli 2014). In addition, Langacker’s reference point model of conceptual structure has been extended as a means of accounting for discourselevel phenomena such as cohesion and coherence (Stockwell 2009; Harrison 2017), and textural experiences of atmosphere and tone (Stockwell 2014b). Chapters 4 and 5 develop the application of the concepts of summary and sequential scanning and the reference point model, respectively, to mind style.

Action chains A final dimension of construal operating at the upper horizontal axis of Figure  3.1 pertains to the structuring of the conceived situation through the imposition of a particular kind of image schema, or action chain. This cognitive model, depicted in Figure 3.5, represents ‘our conception of objects moving through space and impacting one another through forceful physical contact’ (Langacker 2008:  355). Unlike the perceptually derived image schemas underlying prominence, the image schema underpinning this dimension of construal derives from the kinaesthetic system. As Johnson (1987) describes:

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We begin to grasp the meaning of physical force from the day we are born (or even before). We have bodies that are acted upon by ‘external’ and ‘internal’ forces such as gravity, light, heat, wind, bodily processes, and the obtrusion of other physical objects. (p. 159)

Based on this experiential reality, the basic schema for the structure of a clause is modelled in CG as a ‘series of forceful interactions, each involving the transmission of energy (double arrow) from one participant to the next’ (Langacker 2008: 355–6). As well as being distinguished as trajector and landmark, the participants in the process profiled by a clause are assigned to a number of archetypal roles. A  distinction is made between an agent, the participant that wilfully carries out an action, and a patient, the participant that is affected or changed in some way by this action, or the ‘energy source’ and ‘energy sink’ in the action chain, respectively (Langacker 2008: 355). In Under the Skin, for example, the expression ‘she stopped the car and took him’ (Faber 2000: 4) can be seen to profile Isserey as the energy source or agent, and the hitch-hiker as the patient, or final recipient of this action. As this example illustrates, other entities (e.g. ‘the car’) can participate or intervene in this chain in various ways. CG identifies the roles of experiencer, mover, instrument and zero (Langacker 2008:  356) and distinguishes these in terms of their varying involvement in the energy transmission. Described as more or less ‘agent-like’ (or patient-like) in this respect (2008: 369), such semantic roles can be viewed as positioned along a continuum between the prototypical roles of agent and patient (Dowty 1991). The structuring of experience modelled in terms of action chains in CG can be effectively compared with the transitivity system set out within systemic-functional grammar (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004). Transitivity, in this account, is the grammatical system responsible for organizing the ‘flow of events’ of which our experience is composed, into a set of process and participant types (2004: 170). Clear overlaps can be identified between semantic roles in CG and the types of participant roles engaged in the processes described in systemic-functional grammar. The latter include an ‘actor’ and a ‘goal’ (≈ CG agent and patient) within material processes; a ‘senser’ or ‘sayer’ (≈ CG experiencer) within mental and verbal processes; and a ‘carrier’ and ‘identifier’ (≈ CG zero) within relational processes. The detailed typology of participants and processes provided by systemicfunctional grammar (extending beyond those identified above) has proved an effective

Figure 3.5. An action chain (based on Langacker 2008: 356).

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framework for stylistic analysis, and particularly for the analysis of the mind style or ideological point of view construed across a text (Burton 1982; Kennedy 1982; Simpson 1993; Simpson and Canning 2014). In relating all of these process types in terms of a single underlying interaction, CG’s action chain model offers a simplification of the transitivity framework, which is capable of describing the same stylistic effects, and the reader processing responsible (Stockwell 2014a; Harrison 2017). Following Harrison (2017), for example, the archetypal roles seen for a character across a text can be seen to contribute to their characterization. In Under the Skin, such analysis could consider the frequency with which the human hitch-hikers are profiled in the role of experiencer across the text, compared to the farmyard animals that Isserley passes in her car. In Chapter 6, I argue that the analysis of action chains with regard to mind style can do more than just replicate transitivity analyses; it can develop and enrich such analyses by explaining the developing impressions of the participants which result.

Perspective Returning to the overall construal configuration depicted in Figure  3.1, the final dimension of construal can be set apart from those described so far in its structuring of the vertical relationship or viewing arrangement between this conceived situation and its conceptualizers (Verhagen 2007: 70). In CG, the communicative context from which this situation is metaphorically ‘viewed’ is termed the ground. The ground generally consists of the speaker and hearer, the speech event, and its immediate circumstances in time and space (Langacker 2008:  78). One aspect of the perspectival dimension of construal is the vantage point assumed by a conceptualizer within this ground. In the default viewing arrangement, ‘the interlocutors are together in a fixed location, from which they observe and describe actual occurrences in the world around them’ (2008:  74). However, conceptualizers may also be separated in time and space, and the vantage point construed may reflect a fictive point of view other than that of the speaker/writer. A second component of this dimension of construal is the extent to which entities at the two levels of the viewing arrangement are subjectively or objectively construed (Langacker 2008:  77). In the default viewing arrangement, compared with the experience of an audience at the theatre (2008: 77), the attention of the conceptualizers is jointly focused upon the object of conception, or the situation ‘onstage’. When attention is fully focused in this way (as in watching a particularly absorbing play), selfawareness, or attention to the subject of conception, is at a minimum. The conceived situation is thus said to be construed with maximal objectivity, and the conceptualizers construed with maximal subjectivity in the ground. The overall construal arrangement, referred to here as an objective construal, is represented in Figure 3.6, part a. Since meaning is conceptualization in CG, the ground always features, at least implicitly, in the meaning of a linguistic expression (Langacker 2008:  262). While isolated nouns and verbs (e.g. car, driving) might be examples of ‘pure’ objective construal unconnected to any conceptualizer (Verhagen 2007: 61), as soon as an article, demonstrative, quantifier, a marker of tense or modality are added, these grounding elements cue the presence of a conceiving consciousness and their vantage point

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Figure 3.6. Objective and subjective construal (based on Verhagen 2007: 61–2).

(Langacker 2008:  259). Furthermore, this ground often plays a more prominent role in conceptualization. Attention may be directed to the conceptualizers, for example, through deictic elements such as pronouns: I, you, or spatial/temporal adverbs: here, now, there, then or through markers of subjective evaluation. In such cases, our attention is redistributed; the conceptualizers are now placed ‘onstage’ and, by drawing our attention, cause less attention to be given to the conceived situation. Such a subjective construal is represented in Figure  3.6, part b. While ‘pure’ examples of subjective construal, lacking a profiled object of conception, can again be identified (e.g. interjections and expressives such as damn, hi, ow; Langacker 2008: 475; Verhagen 2007: 61), these two alternative construals, and their differing assignments of prominence, can be seen as opposite ends of graded cline between which most linguistic expressions are situated. A typical sentence from Under the Skin, seen in (f) (Faber 2000: 1), exemplifies such a midway point along this cline, in which both the object of conception (the A9 road and its surrounding landscape), and the subjective vantage point, impressions and attitudes of its focalizing subject, are prominent to some degree. f. Even in the nacreous hush of a winter dawn, when the mists were still dossed down on either side, the A9 could not be trusted to stay empty for long. Underpinning this distinction in construal is a view of attention as a ‘limited resource’ which must be ‘allocated’ (Langacker 2008: 365), or distributed between subject and object of conception as competing participants. Allocating attention to one reduces attention to the other; like a see-saw, one goes up as the other goes down. According to Langacker, when one participant is left unspecified, the other becomes more salient just through the absence of competition. On the other hand, augmenting the salience of one participant diminishes that of others (in relative terms) even when they are fully specified. (2008: 384)

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This discussion of attention can be compared with ‘resource theories’ of attention in studies of dual-task performance (Kahneman 1973; Navon and Gopher 1979). Notably, such accounts of attention, alongside alternative ‘filter’ models (Broadbent 1958), remain undecided in cognitive psychology (Styles 2006: 153–91). While applied with some caution, therefore, the notion of resources accounts for a range of data, including, as we will see, the reader responses analysed in this book. Overlaps between this dimension of construal and concepts such as point of view in stylistics and narratology have been observed in existing applications (Herman 2009a; Stockwell 2009; Tabakowska 2014; Harrison 2017). Viewed in this way, complex debates around point of view might be better understood in terms of our real-life experiences of perception. Herman (2009a: 132) argues that a cognitive linguistic model of construal dimensions offers ‘a more unified, systematic treatment of perspective-related aspects of narrative structure’ than is possible in previous accounts of focalization. Throughout this book, I hope to show that CG perspective provides a basis for a discussion of the multiple levels of point of view simultaneously possible in narrative, including those of writers, narrators and characters.

3.5 Simulation Another basic feature of cognition that manifests in language is our ability to transcend our immediate, physical circumstances and engage with situations that are remembered, predicted, abstract or imaginary. Our processing of such fictive situations, and the ‘disengaged cognition’ they involve, is described as a ‘shadow version’, or simulation, of its engaged, bodily experience (Langacker 2008: 536). This discussion draws upon a growing body of research in cognitive science, in which conceptualization generally, and language processing specifically, is said to involve cognitive mechanisms active during perception and action (Barsalou 1999; Glenberg and Kaschak 2002; Zwaan 2004; Niedenthal et  al. 2005; Speer et  al. 2009). In Barsalou’s influential account, ‘simulation is the re-enactment of perceptual, motor and introspective states acquired during experience with the world, body and mind’ (2009: 1281). For Langacker, simulations are the basis for our awareness of the mental experiences of other conceptualizer(s) involved in a construal, and our ability to adopt a fictive vantage point. In this sense, our comprehension of any linguistic construal always involves, to some extent, a simulation of the experiences of the conceptualizer from which it originates. Following Barsalou (1999), simulations are viewed as a key part of the encyclopaedic meaning of linguistic forms4: Included in the meaning of apricot, for example, are images of what one looks like and how it tastes. Included in the meaning of throw are visual and motor images of throwing. Activating appropriate images – simulating the experiences they represent – is a non-trivial aspect of apprehending such expressions. (Langacker 2008: 536)

In CG, simulation is always attenuated to some degree relative to engaged experience (Langacker 2008: 536–7). In other words, it ‘lacks the intensity or “vividness” of such

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experience’, while its content, in the form of visual, auditory and motor imagery, is ‘more schematic, lacking fine-grained detail’. What this amounts to, in our felt experience as readers, is a variable degree of ‘awareness’ of the simulated experience, or the mental operations involved in its conceptualization (2008: 537). This concept has a basis once again in Barsalou’s (1999, 2009) account, in which ‘re-enactments are always partial and potentially inaccurate’, and conscious/unconscious to varying degrees (2009:  1281). Langacker (2005) suggests a number of linguistic factors affecting the attenuation of a simulation for a linguistic unit, including the extent to which the unit is entrenched, subordinated within a complex construction, and the extent to which the situation it profiles is subjectively or objectively construed. In cognitive approaches to literature, the concept of linguistically cued mental simulations of actions, perceptions and emotions is used to account for readers’ experiences of being immersed in fictional worlds and points of view (Jajdelska et al. 2010; Kuzmičová 2012; Rice 2012; Troscianko 2013; Dancygier 2014). As described in Section 2.6, simulations more broadly provide the basis for an account of reader experiences of empathy and sympathy for fictional characters. The role of stylistic choices in manipulating such experiential effects, and their underlying simulations, represents a significant question for cognitive stylistics (Sanford and Emmott 2012:  133), and one which is particularly relevant to mind style. Applying CG, the impression of a mind style is more than just the recognition or attribution of a fictional mind. It involves a simulation of the character’s cognitive processes as part of a reader’s conceptualization of the fictional world. This simulation may be experienced as more or less attenuated, according to the grammatical structures adopted in its presentation. As I shall argue in Chapters 4 to 7, CG’s concept of attenuation, and description of the linguistic factors which contribute, can be seen to provide a starting point for such investigation.

3.6 Discourse In CG, such concepts and processes, described largely at the clause level, are said to be applicable to the production and comprehension of entire texts. While differences may exist in their operation at this discourse level, ‘the contrast with lower levels is at most a matter of degree’ (Langacker 2008: 457). As with lower levels of linguistic organization, repeated usage events may give rise to discourse-level linguistic units in the form of paragraphs, conversational turns, chapters, or even entire texts. In CG, usage events are situated within a current discourse space (CDS), which comprises ‘everything presumed to be shared by the speaker and hearer as the basis for communication at any given moment’ (Langacker 2008: 466). The CDS, represented in Figure  3.7, includes the construal configuration discussed previously in Section 3.4, along with other relevant aspects of this transient discourse context and shared knowledge, and any previous and anticipated usage events in relation to the current moment of discourse. Any aspect (or aspects) of usage events may be abstracted as a conventional linguistic unit. For example, it is through entrenchment and schematization of the CDS in which

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Figure 3.7. The current discourse space (adapted from Langacker 2001: 145; 2008: 466).

sorry to bother you occurs – typically with a certain kind of communicative ground and at the start of a sequence of further usage events – that this unit conventionally encodes politeness and the initiation of a conversational turn. In systemic-functional grammar terms (Section 2.2), it is through schematization of the content of the viewing frame that the ideational metafunction of language is derived, and the abstraction of aspects of the ground and viewing arrangement that its interpersonal metafunction originates. Finally, schematization of the relationship with previous or subsequent usage events and their wider context can be seen as the source of the textual metafunction. For example, linguistic units may be retrospective or prospective with regard to the expectations they engender for the information structuring of the discourse (Langacker 2008: 460). Linguistic units often combine all three functions in discourse. Modelled as a conventional linguistic unit, for example, a discourse genre such as speculative fiction can be viewed as a schematized set of typical situations (processes and participants) in the viewing frame, a particular kind of viewing arrangement between this situation and the writer and reader, and a number of structural expectations, all held within a particular speech community. In CG, each successive utterance updates the CDS, building upon our existing conceptualization. Viewed within this interactive context, linguistic units and their construals can be viewed as ‘instructions issued by the speaker for the addressee’ for the updating of this space (Langacker 2008:  460, original emphasis). Successive construals represent a ‘series of conceptions’, each of which ‘develops from and builds upon the previous one, so as discourse proceeds an integrated conceptual structure of progressively greater complexity is being constructed’ (2008: 486). Drawing on mental spaces theory (Fauconnier 1994; Fauconnier and Sweetser 1996), Langacker describes these conceptions as mental spaces and their progressive integration in discourse as structure building (2008: 488).

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Such structure building may be seen to operate at the level of clauses, sentences, paragraphs, texts, etc. within discourse, dependent on how closely we choose to examine it. One significant level of structural organization, suggested by Langacker, is that of attentional frames. Manifesting as cohesive intonation groups in spoken language, and graphological units in written language, attentional frames represent ‘successive windows of attention, each subsuming a manageable amount of conceptual content’ (Langacker 2008: 481–2), or the body of information that is ‘simultaneously available’ for processing at any one time during discourse (Langacker 2001:  55). Attentional frames can thus be viewed as coinciding with usage events, as represented in Figure 3.7, and the series of mental spaces through which a higher-level composite structure is built for the discourse. In CG, attentional frames are ‘the primary units of discourse processing’ (2008: 486).5 A number of general principles for structure building are proposed, based on this idea of attentional frames. In ‘effective discourse’, attentional frames present self-contained portions of new information at a manageable rate, and prototypically conform to a natural path of mental access (Langacker 2008: 501) or a reference point chain through conceptual structure. The overall conceptual structures built up in this way, however, represent a less well-developed area of CG (2001: 177; 2008: 489). Langacker notes that the integration of content into a developing representation proceeds simultaneously at multiple language levels, along different timescales and involving different forms of short-term and long-term memory. The unfolding discourse structure is described as ‘a kind of temporary scaffolding, put up in stages in order to construct the more permanent consolidated structure’ (2001:  181). Furthermore, such assemblies are diverse and complex: ‘discourse is not connected to the building of a single connected structure’ but may involve the assembly of multiple structures ‘in distinct channels, worlds or mental spaces, either successively or by shifting back and forth between them’ (2001:  177). The structuring of conceptualizations across larger stretches of language, and their unfolding during online processing, represents an area in need of investigation for the application of CG to discourse. The extent to which concepts and processes developed at the clause level can be applied to the discourse level has been a recurring focus in applications of CG to literature. Effective applications of concepts such as symbolic units, construal and fictive simulation to poems and narratives provide support for their view as inherently scalable (Dancygier 2012; Harrison 2017). However, as Harrison (2017:  25–6) acknowledges, it is problematic to presuppose a direct transfer of concepts from the discussion of clauses to discourse. A means of avoiding potential problems, Harrison suggests, is through an ‘amalgamated approach’ which makes use of other discourse frameworks as a comparative basis for this development. Based on its points of contact with existing models, Harrison (2017) suggests that CG is best viewed not as a replacement for existing frameworks in stylistics, but as an extension. Leading on from such arguments, this book develops the points of contact identified by Harrison (also Stockwell 2002, 2009; Browse 2014) by providing a detailed discussion of the relationship between CG and systemic-functional grammar (in Section 3.7) and between CG and text world theory (in Section 3.8). The rest of

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this chapter considers the developmental relationship between these three frameworks within stylistics and linguistics more broadly.

3.7 Cognitive grammar and systemic-functional grammar The previous chapter suggested that there are similarities between systemic-functional grammar and CG for the analysis of mind style. For example, the two were said to be directly comparable in their suggestion that language ‘construes’ experiences of reality through meaningful grammatical choices (e.g. Halliday and Matthiessen 1999). A number of analysts have observed a common ground between these two approaches in broader terms (Butler and Gonzáles-García 2005; Nuyts 2007; Hart 2010, 2011). Essentially, both are ‘functionally oriented’, ‘usage-based’ models of language which view linguistic structure as motivated by patterns of use in communication (Nuyts 2007: 543). In CG, this functionalism is made explicit in the claim that ‘language – when properly analysed  – is by and large reasonable and understandable in view of its semiological and interactive functions, as well as its biological, cognitive and sociocultural grounding’ (Langacker 2008: 14). However, the two frameworks can be distinguished in their specific focus with regard to this functionality. First, cognitive linguistic approaches, it has been suggested, tend to focus upon the biological and cognitive grounding of language as opposed to its sociocultural grounding, and therefore describe its semantic functions (conceptualization) at the expense of its interactive and discursive functions (communication) (Geeraerts and Cuyckens 2007:  15; see also Stockwell 2001). Systemic-functional approaches, on the other hand, tend to provide less detailed accounts of conceptualization than those offered by cognitive approaches. Looking specifically at the frameworks under consideration here, CG’s attention to the interactive and discursive functions of language in a final chapter titled ‘Frontiers’ (Langacker 2008) is clearly less developed than the rich account of the interpersonal and textual metafunctions which are an ‘integral component’ of systemic-functional grammar (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004:  31). Equally, while systemic-functional grammar pays close attention to conceptualization and cognition, its use of language as the primary means of understanding them (Halliday and Matthiessen 1999: 3) can be directly contrasted with CG’s ‘requirement of psychological plausibility’ (Langacker 2008: 14, my emphasis), or the principled application of concepts validated in other cognitive scientific disciplines. For Nuyts (2007), these frameworks approach a shared interest in grammatical description from different directions, and so offer distinct and complementary insights. With such differences in mind, the application of CG to literature offers benefits for both stylistics and cognitive linguistics. Most importantly, CG’s detailed account of conceptualization offers a more ‘psychologically plausible’ basis for the stylistic analysis of literary reading than has been possible in previous accounts using a Hallidayan approach. CG’s descriptions of language are based on concepts that are empirically supported in cognitive research, for example, in experimental

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studies of mental simulation (Matlock 2004), or neuroscientific support for image schemas (Dodge and Lakoff 2005). Where this empirical support is missing, its descriptions are based on ‘well-known and easily demonstrated cognitive phenomena’ (Langacker 2008: 85). Such theoretical claims call for detailed empirical investigation, in line with increasing emphasis upon empirical methodologies within cognitive linguistics more broadly (e.g. Geeraerts 2006; Bennett 2014). As a step in the right direction, recent research in psycholinguistics, neuroscience and cognitive psychology has provided growing support for some of CG’s fundamental concepts (Evans 2009b:  278). The explicit links that CG establishes between cognitive phenomena and grammatical choices in this way can therefore be seen to add a cognitive specificity to the ideational metafunction of language described in systemic-functional grammar. As a result, CG provides an effective basis for a cognitive stylistic account of construed meaning, or readers’ mental representations of texts. On the other hand, CG stands to gain from development in its account of the interpersonal and textual metafunctions of language. While the textual function concerns open questions surrounding ‘structure building’ and discourse discussed in the previous section, when it comes to the interpersonal function, the framework has the necessary concepts built in. As Langacker emphasizes, the interpersonal role of language, or its communicative role in building relationships, expressing identity and so on, is grounded in conceptualization: A key point (often missed) is that conception, instead of being insular, is a primary means of interacting with the world, including other minds. Based on our ability to simulate the experience of other conceptualizers, each with their own perspective, speaking (or writing) is an intersubjective process aimed at negotiating a shared contextual awareness (2014: xiv)

Developing the interpersonal dimension of CG, therefore, ‘does not require any modifications in the framework, but is simply a matter of exploiting the potential which has been there all along’ (Langacker 2001: 185). Exploiting this potential can be seen as an important development for CG, since, for Edwards (1997:  84), the functioning of language as ‘social action’ motivates the use of cognitive resources for conceptualization. As Fowler (1977:  77) previously put it:  ‘ideational answers to interpersonal structure’. Stylistics is concerned with situated uses of language – discourse with identifiable communicative and sociocultural functions. Application of CG as part of a contextually aware cognitive stylistics can thus begin to relate grammatical structures and their underlying cognitive mechanisms to specific discourse contexts and effects. This goal can be compared with work in critical discourse analysis (Hart 2010, 2011, 2013; Jaakola et  al. 2014), which associates construal operations with ideologically motivated discourse strategies. In the case of mind style, this involves attention to the author and reader minds interacting via a text and the emotional, ethical and ideological significance of this effect. The following section moves on to consider CG’s relationship with text world theory. This cognitive discourse framework provides useful concepts for the development of

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CG for stylistic application. Most importantly for mind style, it offers a clear basis for discussion of the world underpinning a worldview.

3.8 Text world theory and cognitive grammar Werth’s (1995, 1999) text world framework represents an early attempt to extend key principles of cognitive linguistics to discourse. Werth draws on Langacker’s (1987, 1991) CG, alongside Fauconnier’s (1994) mental spaces theory and Lakoff ’s (1987) theory of idealized cognitive models, as a foundation for his concept of text worlds. Fundamentally, he argues that we both produce and comprehend discourse through the negotiated construction of an online mental representation, or text world, for the situations presented in a text. While providing the basic concepts for this framework in their shared view of meaning as conceptualization, the focus of these cognitive linguistic approaches below the sentence level is said to prevent them from providing a ‘fully integrated’ theory of language (Werth 1999:  77). Specifically, they lack ‘an account of knowledge structure and of discourse context’ (Werth 1999: 46, original emphasis). Text world theory thus sets out to link a cognitivist view of language with such discourse concerns, as part of a cognitive discourse grammar (1999: 46). A text world is a ‘deictic space’ which is initially defined by linguistic prompts within the discourse and developed during online processing (Werth 1999: 51). These mental representations are viewed as equivalent to mental models (Johnson-Laird 1983) in terms of their analogue structure, rich detail, and ‘direct resemblance to the real-world situations they represent’ (Gavins 2007: 4).6 Significantly, discourse processing consists of the conceptualization of multiple such text worlds, each corresponding to the scene or portion of the discourse that is ‘in focus’ at any given moment (Werth 1999: 86). While the current focused text world is progressively enriched, linguistic cues also trigger further world switches representing a situation in another time or place, or modal worlds representing the attitudes, desires and beliefs of a character within the text (Gavins 2007). The developing configuration of text worlds formed in this way can be directly compared with the multiple mental spaces which are progressively integrated in the CG account of structure building, as represented earlier in Figure 3.7 (see also Dancygier 2012). Gavins states that we ‘connect our multiple mental representations to form a coherent and meaningful whole in a variety of ways’ (2007: 6). Through its diagrammatic representations of the ‘complex world-structures’ prompted by individual texts (Gavins 2010: 406), applications of text world theory can be seen to go beyond CG in exploring the complexity and diversity of the composite structures constructed in this way. However, the experience of the overall structure built for a text, and its holistic or ‘consolidated’ representation in memory (Langacker 2001: 181; Section 3.6), is an area in need of development in both frameworks. A CG account of our processing of such a global representation, or what I refer to as a world configuration, will be outlined in Chapter 4. The two models can be further compared in their analysis of the linguistic forms which bring about such conceptualizations. In text world theory the construction of a

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text world is triggered by two types of linguistic information: world-building elements such as deictic and referential elements which ground and specify entities within the conceived space, and function-advancing propositions, which profile the relationships and processes that occur within it (Werth 1999: 180–209). Indeed, Werth’s (1999: 196– 202) original account divides function-advancing propositions into ‘steady-state propositions’ and ‘change of state propositions’ to reflect Langacker’s distinction between atemporal relationships and processes, and their associated processing. Subsequent developments of text world theory, most notably Gavins (2007), have largely abandoned the description of such textual prompts in terms of CG concepts, choosing instead to adopt a systemic-functional grammar description. Gavins (2007: 64) notes that while systemic-functional grammar provides an effective basis for detailed ‘component labelling’ of world-builders and function-advancers in terms of types of relational, material and mental processes, text world theory is more concerned with their ‘experiential significance’ for readers. I have argued elsewhere that the (re) adoption of CG as the grammatical basis for close stylistic analysis enhances our ability to account for the experiential effects of specific stylistic choices during text world construction (Nuttall 2014). One way in which text world theory is said to develop CG is through its detailed and systematic attention to context (Werth 1999: 77). In this framework, the role of context in discourse processing is modelled in the form of a discourse world which includes the participants, their communicative situation, and the varied knowledge and identities they bring to bear on the text. Like the text world, this discourse world is a rich mental representation cued by the text, and subject to the varied construal of the participants. The discourse world can therefore be seen as equivalent to the ground in CG (Section 3.4; see also Browse 2014: 75). These two models have their respective merits. Through its discussion of the discourse world, text world theory pays attention to the specific nature of the grounds encountered in literary discourse and their effects upon conceptualization. These include the ‘split’ discourse worlds of written texts (Gavins 2007: 26) and the tendency to ground worlds in relation to a fictive communicative situation, containing a narrator and narratee (Browse 2014: 75; see also Dancygier 2012: 19–21). On the other hand, as suggested elsewhere (Nuttall 2017), Langacker’s model offers an extension of text world theory’s representation of context in the form of the CDS within which this ground/ discourse world is more broadly situated (Figure 3.7). By explicitly representing the dynamic nature of discourse processing as a sequence of usage events/attentional frames, including those prior, current and anticipated at any given moment, the CDS provides a model of the changing knowledge and expectations of discourse participants in the course of a single text. A related development said to be offered by text world theory is its detailed account of knowledge structure and its role within interpretation (Werth 1999: 77). Building on the notion of frames (Fillmore 1982, 1985), Werth models the activation of schematic knowledge by world-building elements, and its contribution to inferencing, according to a principle of text-drivenness (Werth 1999: 149). This principle is often said to set text world theory apart from alternative models such as mental spaces theory for the purposes of cognitive stylistic analysis (Stockwell 2009:  177; Dancygier 2012:  36).

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However, the incremental updating of a text world and the knowledge frames upon which it draws, presents an ‘open question’ (Werth 1999: 361). In Chapters 4 and 5, I argue that the text-driven activation and updating of knowledge involved in world building and knowledge incrementation (Werth 1999: 289–312) can be explained using CG concepts.

Worlds and minds So far, this comparison has suggested that CG and text world theory might have things to offer one another as a basis for cognitive stylistic analysis. For the most part, in this book, I make use of text world terminology to talk about the conceptual structures constructed and integrated by readers at the discourse level during reading. These are the discourse world, the text world and the subcategories of the latter (world switches and modal worlds) triggered by particular linguistic choices in the text (Gavins 2007). This terminology offers a more nuanced account of the mental spaces involved in discourse-level language processing, and so clarifies discussion of the fictional world as part of an analysis of mind style. It is at this level, I would argue, that text world theory offers the most useful development of CG for the analysis of literature. A further aspect of text world theory of relevance to this book is the recent work carried out in this area which attempts to account for readers’ experiences of the points of view encountered in narrative. Semino (2009: 68) describes the biggest challenge facing worlds-based approaches in cognitive stylistics as that of providing an adequate account of ‘the potential complexity and variety of the relationships between fictional minds and text worlds in fiction and literature’. In text world theory, representation of the point of view of a character or narrator triggers the construction of an epistemic modal world (Gavins 2010:  407). In cases where focalization is ‘fixed’ with one character, as is often the case for mind style, this enactor is said to become the reader’s point of access to the world-building and function-advancing information presented for the fictional reality. In CG terms, it is the enactor and the text world in which they are situated that forms the ground (as opposed to the writer and reader in the discourse world), and the subject of conception through which the situation is construed (Browse 2014). Furthermore, multiple worlds may be embedded in this way, for example, reflecting the perspectives of a narrator, character, and any number of further modalized enactors. These developments suggest a possible extension of the construal configuration represented earlier in Figure 3.1 to recognize such multiple levels (or grounds), in what Leech and Short (2007: 211) term the ‘discourse structure’ of narrative, as in Figure 3.8. In this diagram, the dashed level indicates the further levels which are possible through the creation of embedded modal worlds containing further character-focalizers. Text world theory offers a rich framework for this development of CG through its detailed account of readers’ deictic shifts of attention between these levels. Drawing on deictic shift theory (Duchan et al. 1995), Gavins (2007: 40) describes the construction of a text world as involving a psychological projection of viewpoint, or an ‘enactor’ of the reader (Stockwell 2009: 165), onto an alternative ‘origo’ within the new deictic space. In text world theory projection gains a broader sense, ‘not simply as the adoption of

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Figure 3.8. Narrative construal configuration (adapted from Verhagen 2007: 60).

the spatiotemporal coordinates of another entity, but the imaginative reconstruction of psychological aspects of that entity’s perspective, including their world-view, attitudes, emotions, goals and so on’ (Whiteley 2011: 27). Further, text world theory explores the ontological and experiential significance of such attentional shifts within discourse. First, shifts into the focalized perspective of a character/narrator have consequences for conceptualization in that they give rise to a world that is enactor-accessible or an ontologically distinct representation of the conceived situation (Gavins 2007: 77). Gavins models projection into such ontologically ‘remote’ worlds spatially, in terms of conceptual distance in relation to the discourse world (Gavins 2007:  11–12). In these spatial terms, text world theory provides a means of accounting for readers’ experiences of transportation, or immersion in a fictional situation or viewpoint, as described in Section 2.6 (Gavins 2007: 41; Stockwell 2009: 80; Whiteley 2011: 24). Moreover, experiences of empathy and sympathy for a character can be neatly distinguished according to the extent of a reader’s projection, corresponding to a felt sense of ‘closeness’ or ‘distance’ in relation to a character or narrator (Whiteley 2011). Finally, this spatial model also fits well with the account of readers’ ethical relationship to characters, narrators and implied authors in terms of their positioning in various ‘audiences’ within the text, as described in narratology (Phelan 1996, 2005, 2007; also Whiteley 2014; Nuttall 2017). Once again, however, CG has insights to offer this discourse framework in terms of the attentional mechanics of these responses. As argued in Section 2.6, engagement with fictional minds can be seen as an experience which implicates readers’ sense of self. A  degree of attention to the reading-self is necessary for the more ‘self-aware connections’ between reader and character minds such as identification, described in text world approaches as a ‘trans-world mapping’ of

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knowledge, experiences and characteristics (Stockwell 2009: 138; Whiteley 2011: 28). Significantly, text world theory, and deictic shift theory upon which it draws, have difficulty in accounting for the attentional mechanics of such experiences, and the simultaneous awareness of multiple deictic centres (or sense of being ‘in’ two worlds at any one time), which they seem to suggest (McIntyre 2006: 111–12; Whiteley 2011: 37; Polvinen 2013). Such complex experiences are ones which emerge frequently in responses to the texts I analyse in Chapters 4 to 7. One explanation in text world accounts is that this seemingly simultaneous awareness of multiple deictic fields is achieved by toggling or shifting rapidly between these domains (McIntyre 2006: 112; Gavins 2007: 152; Sanford and Emmott 2012: 53– 5). Alternatively, McIntyre (2006: 114) offers a developed version of deictic shift theory capable of explaining ‘our ability to be aware of more than one deictic field at any given time’, by drawing on the notions of priming and binding within contextual frame theory (Emmott 1997). In this account, while multiple deictic fields may be monitored at different levels of awareness, only one will be primed as the ‘prominent’ focus of attention at any one time (McIntyre 2006: 115). A compatible account of such reader processing can be found by applying the CG understanding of attention in terms of ‘resources’, and the graded scale of subjective and objective construal described in Section 3.4. In the simplest terms, a reader’s deictic centre in the discourse world and a character’s deictic centre in the text world can be seen to vary in their relative prominence as the subject and object of construal, respectively. In this account, a highly self-effacing projection, or immersive and ‘close’ engagement with a fictional mind, is modelled as an objective construal of this fictional mind, as represented in Figure 3.6, part a, and a vivid simulation of their experiences of the text world in which they are situated (Section 3.5). On the other hand, a more self-aware and qualitatively ‘distanced’ engagement with this mind would be a subjective construal, and attenuated simulation of these experiences, as represented in Figure 3.6, part b. Far more common in CG are construals located between these two extremes, which involve a degree of attention to both subject and object of conception. Through positioning along a cline of prominence between the two, experiences such as sympathy and empathy might therefore be described as different kinds of perspectival construal (see also Stockwell 2009: 46). Drawing on emerging cognitive scientific evidence for a common neural basis for processes of social cognition such as Theory of Mind and our selective attention to stimuli (Decety and Lamm 2007; Kerr 2008; Mundy and Jarrold 2010), a model of engagement with fictional minds based on scaled attention would seem to be appropriate. In addition, objective/subjective construal can be extended to the multiple conceptualizers and embedded grounds encountered in the complex discourse structures observed in literature (see Figure 3.8). Such ‘fractal arrangements’ of nested conceptualizers, Langacker (2008: 484) suggests, reflect ‘an axis extending from the entities construed most objectively (the profiled process and its trajector) to the ultimate subject of conception’. This is represented in Figure 3.9. Developing this idea, the more conceptualizers which mediate a construal, the more distributed our attention, and the less objective and vividly simulated the ultimate conceived situation, or text world. Further, by describing the role of specific linguistic

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Figure  3.9. Distributed attention across multiple conceptualizers (in an objective construal).

choices in determining the subjectivity or objectivity of a construal, this CG model provides a means of analysing the way in which empathy is linguistically manipulated in relation to particular entities within a text. This extended construal configuration might be seen as a text world diagram stood on its end, with the projections from discourse world to text world and various subworlds typically represented horizontally from left to right (e.g. Gavins 2007) now seen vertically from bottom to top. While text world diagrams better capture the dynamics of deictic shifts during reading, I would argue that both diagrams have their merits for distinct analytical purposes. Rather than emphasizing the world boundaries which separate these narrative levels and readers’ shifts between them through time, Figure 3.8 specifically represents the reader’s attention (at any one moment of reading) to the various conceptualizers contained within them. As I shall argue in Chapters 4 to 7, this provides a useful basis for discussing the attribution of mind style to author, narrator and characters at these different levels.

3.9 Conclusion This chapter has begun to explore some of the concepts offered by CG for the analysis of mind style. Building upon the ‘points of contact’ noted in previous cognitive stylistic applications of CG (Stockwell 2002, 2009; Browse 2014; Harrison 2017), it has offered a detailed discussion of this model’s relationship with systemic-functional grammar and text world theory. First, while sharing many ideas with systemic-functional grammar, CG offers an account of literary discourse and its meaning which sets out to be

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psychologically plausible (Langacker 2008), in the sense that it draws upon models of cognition and supporting empirical evidence in the cognitive sciences. Psychological plausibility is something of a moving target: a principle rather than an endpoint, and ongoing empirical testing of CG’s concepts is necessary. In this book, I highlight new links with psycholinguistic and stylistic research which lend additional support to CG’s concepts, and, equally, identify where this support is currently lacking. The present chapter has highlighted some of the areas in which CG is in particular need of development, including the online interaction between a bottom-up assembly of constructions and a top-down activation of schematic knowledge, and the complex configurations of mental spaces, or ‘structure building’, involved in discourse processing. The application of CG to reader processing of literary discourse is one means of developing the framework in these areas. By exploring one such application, this book aims to generate specific hypotheses which can be tested empirically. Second, this chapter has discussed CG’s relationship with text world theory and has proposed that these two related frameworks offer respective merits for stylistic analysis. I have argued elsewhere (Nuttall 2014) that CG offers a detailed grammatical framework for the contribution of specific linguistic structures to ‘world building’ and ‘function advancing’ in text world theory (Gavins 2007). On the other hand, what text world theory offers CG is a detailed model of the mental spaces, or ‘worlds’, we construct and connect during our processing of discourse, and the multiple conceptualizers, or ontologically distinct ‘enactors’, we attend to within them. Such a systematic account of fictional worlds and points of view are crucial for a cognitive stylistic approach to mind style. In Chapter 4, I develop this approach, and its insights for mind style, through textual analysis.

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Syntax and thought

4.1 Introduction One way in which linguistic choices may give the impression of a mind style is through syntax. In the example from Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in Section 2.3, repeated use of the coordinating conjunction and can be seen as contributing to our recognition of a child-like mind style for its narrator. Indeed, the syntactic structures adopted by writers such as Joyce, Faulkner and Woolf have often been viewed as indicative of a particular ‘stream of consciousness’, or flow of thought, for their characters. Such interpretative parallels between linguistic structure and mental structure are ones that CG can help to explain. In this chapter, I show how the concepts of prominence and dynamicity can help to account for the effects of such syntactic choices for mind style. After reviewing existing discussions of mind style in stylistics in Section 4.2, I  develop a CG approach in Section 4.3, elaborating on the concepts introduced in the previous chapter. I then use this approach to explore the mind style presented in Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). As will be the case for the chapters which follow, I begin my discussion of the text in Section 4.4 by comparing reported reader experiences in literary criticism with a sample of hundred reviews of the novel on Goodreads.com. The textual analysis which follows in Sections 4.5 to 4.7 aims to account for these varied reader responses, alongside my own reading of the text. I argue that the cumulative effects of a range of linguistic choices across the novel, including punctuation, coordination and negation, collectively contribute to the impression of a distinctive mind style for the novel’s main character, and its emotional and ethical interpetation by readers.

4.2 Stream of consciousness In stylistics, the syntactic choices made by writers/speakers are held to be a significant aspect of their style. Leech and Short (2007: chapter 7) describe three important factors of textual organization: ‘segmentation’, ‘sequence’ and ‘salience’. Choices made as to the segmentation of written language using punctuation, the ordering of these segments, and the degree of sentence complexity, or use of coordination and subordination to

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relate structures within them, are all said to have consequences for readers’ processing of the language and their experience of what is described. In some texts, Fowler argues, syntactic choices can lead to the impression of a mind style. In stream of consciousness writing, he argues, ‘surface structure syntax is used to dramatize the structure of characters’ and narrator’s conscious thoughts’ (1977: 104; see also Toolan 2001: 122). Fowler exemplifies this in an extract from Joyce’s Ulysses, in which a mind style is identified for the character Leopold Bloom: Gasworks. Whooping cough they say it cures. Good job Milly never got it. Poor children! Doubles them up black and blue with convulsions. Shame really. Got off lightly with illness compared. Only measles. Flaxseed tea. Scarlatina, influenza epidemics. Canvassing for death. Don’t miss this chance. Dogs’ home over there. Poor old Athos! Be good to Athos, Leopold, is my last wish. Thy will be done. We obey them in the grave. A  dying scrawl. He took it to heart, pined away. Quiet brute. Old men’s dogs usually are. (Joyce 2008 [1922]: 87)

In his interpretation of this mind style, Fowler suggests that the short sentences and deletion of parts of their syntactic structure seen here result in a style of thought which, through lack of syntactic elaboration, is incapable of any exploratory, analytic development of an idea. Complex sentences combining numbers of deep structures in a variety of ways  – a syntax absolutely avoided in Joyce’s handling of Bloom’s thoughts  – suggest, rightly or wrongly, logical sophistication, precision, mental flexibility; Bloom’s syntax connotes crudeness, dogmatism, lack of intellectual finesse. (1977: 104).

Here, Fowler identifies an interpretative association between forms of simple and complex syntax1 and a certain ‘style of thought’. In terms of Leech and Short’s factor of ‘salience’, Bloom’s simple syntax could be said to lack hierarchical structuring of its component structures through subordination and so presents a ‘sequence of impressions’ as opposed to a ‘single, complex awareness of a number of things’ integrated in the mind of this character (cf. Leech and Short 2007: 177). In the following section I offer a compatible, cognitively informed account using CG. It should be noted that this account does not venture to argue whether or not the resulting interpretation is made ‘rightly or wrongly’ (Fowler 1977), but rather how our processing of this linguistic structure leads us to form these impressions.

4.3 Structuring reality in cognitive grammar In CG, the way we organize our language in syntax reflects the way we organize our perceptions of reality. Underpinning both is an ‘imposition of structure’ achieved via a basic process of comparison (Langacker 1987:  105). In everyday perception and cognition, it is through comparison of objects, entities and ideas that we recognize patterns or regularity around us, as well as difference or change. One difference we

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regularly perceive is that between figure and ground (Section 3.4). Through its linguistic manifestation in forms of prominence, figure and ground is one kind of structure that we impose upon our experiences when expressing them in language. This kind of structuring can be applied to the representation of fictional worlds. Stockwell (2009:  20) describes the world projected by a text as one which contains ‘more objects vying for attention than can be assimilated in totality, so that one interpretative configuration or another must be imposed to make sense of what is being experienced’. Drawing on CG, Stockwell describes this interpretative configuration as ‘a cline of prominence’, made up of degrees of foreground and background (2009: 22). It is by inviting readers to structure their mental representation in this way, or what Tabakowska (1993) refers to as a ‘hierarchic image’, that some fictional worlds are said to achieve a realistic sense of depth, which imitates 3D perception (Tabakowska 1993: 52; Stockwell 2009: 43). Stockwell describes the linguistic cues responsible for this structuring as ‘textual attractors’ of reader attention (2009:  25). These include syntactic choices such as active or passive voice. At the clausal level, the choice of subject and object assigns one entity to the role of trajector (the grammatical figure) and another to the role of landmark (the grammatical ground). Moving up to the sentence level, different choices of coordination and subordination are said to assign different degrees of prominence to entities. Simply put, coordinating conjunctions such as ‘and’, ‘or’ assign equal prominence to their conjuncts, while subordinating conjunctions and adverbs such as ‘that’ or ‘when’ cause the content profiled by the main clause to be figural, and the contents of the subordinate clause to be grounded (Langacker 2009; chapters 11 and 12). Moving on to the discourse level, our processing of discourse is understood to involve progressively updating an overall structure through attention to individual portions in attentional frames (Section 3.6). The mental representation we construct in this way is modelled as a dynamic conceptual hierarchy, with new content profiled as the figure at any one time, and other content demoted to the ground. Returning to Bloom’s mind style in Ulysses, the impression of this character’s lack of ‘exploratory, analytical development of an idea’ might be understood as a consequence of our attentional processing of the ideas profiled by his language. Since, in CG, subject–verb–object structure represents a prototypical manifestation of figure/ground alignment, the ellipsis of subjects (or trajectors) in sentences such as: ‘Canvassing for death. Don’t miss this chance’, and in other cases, the presence only of this figure, with no ground: ‘Flaxseed tea. Scarlatina, influenza epidemics’ means that this basic comparison between entities or ideas is absent from the description. In addition, without the figure/ground alignment indicated by subordination, this further level of comparison is also denied. Instead, syntactically, each of Bloom’s sentences has equal prominence to the one before it. As Stockwell (2009) suggests, where syntactic indicators of relative prominence are absent, other attractors such as the ‘newness’ of each successive piece of information is likely to take precedent. Rather than attending to, and comparing, multiple such components simultaneously as part of a single hierarchical structure, our attention shifts between each newly encountered figure as we read.

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This account so far bears close resemblance to that of Leech and Short, and in particular their discussion of ‘salience’. What has changed is the framing of this account in terms shared with cognitive science. Doing so allows this linguistic effect to be considered in light of ongoing research into attention in cognitive psychology (Logan 1996; Styles 2006; Carstensen 2007; Wagemans et al. 2012). As was described in the previous chapter, rather than restricting attention to a single focus or figure at any one moment, the CG discussion of prominence describes our ability to divide or distribute attentional resources to multiple stimuli. This phenomenon is well documented in psychological discussions of joint attention, and explained in terms of rapid shifts of attention between foci (Eriksen and Yeh 1985) or an understanding of attention as a ‘searchlight’ (Broadbent 1982: 271) or ‘zoom-lens’ (Eriken and Murphy 1987) of variable width. Evidence in support of this model suggests that attention may be narrow and focused upon selective elements in serial fashion, and at other times may be distributed to allow parallel processing of multiple elements (Styles 2006: 65).2 Another relevant CG concept here is dynamicity, or the manner in which prominent components are processed, or scanned, by readers (Section 3.4). In line with Leech and Short’s (2007) discussion of ‘sequence’, the concept of sequential scanning is applicable to the inherently linear process of reading and the significance of the order in which new entities or ideas are accessed. Adding to this account, CG describes a second type of scanning: summary scanning, as the way in which such entities and ideas are combined to form an overall structure, or holistic conception. In CG, the two types of scanning are coexisting aspects of our ‘normal observation of events’ (Langacker 2008: 111) and, by extension, our linguistic representation of them: As we scan through a complex scene, successively attending to various facets of it, the elements apprehended at each stage are summed, or superimposed. In this way a detailed conception is progressively built up, becoming active and available as a simultaneously accessible whole for a certain span of processing time. (p. 83)

Again, we can look to corroborate this account in other cognitive disciplines. Notably, some cognitive linguists have questioned this scanning distinction as one which lacks clear empirical support (Francis 2000:  100–101). Broccias and Hollmann (2007) question the extent to which such forms of scanning, often operating ‘below the threshold of conscious awareness’ in Langacker’s (2008:  501) account, offer an empirically testable distinction within language processing. While the need for testing is clear, our ability to perceive multiple entities one at a time, or altogether, are arguably basic, demonstrable aspects of our moment-to-moment experience. Further, connections are made between sequential scanning and growing evidence for the concept of mental simulations (see Section 3.5). For Langacker, ‘Sequential scanning amounts to nothing more than mental simulation of the sequentiality inherent in realtime event experience’ (2008b: 582). Applied to literary discourse, these two types of scanning provide a means of describing the way in which sequentially accessed things, relationships and processes are combined to form an overall ‘interpretative configuration’ (Stockwell 2009:  20)

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in the minds of readers. The results of this processing during reading can be seen to correspond to the notion of a text world, described as a ‘holistic’, ‘analogue’ mental representation of the discourse (Gavins 2007: 4). In addition, the two types of scanning might also be applied to the interpretative configurations formed at a higher level: to the ‘coherent and meaningful whole’ (Gavins 2007:  6), or configuration of worlds, conceptualized by readers for an entire text. Since Langacker regards the management of mental spaces in discourse to be an extension of processes involved in grammatical composition (2008: 486) such structure building at this discourse level might also be discussed in terms of an interaction between sequential and summary scanning in the processing of multiple worlds. As with prominence, the dynamicity of a construal is shaped by the linguistic choices made in the text, and this includes linguistic choices relating to syntax. While sequential scanning offers the ‘most natural’ means of apprehending a situation through time, the inherent dynamicity of a situation may be manifested in its linguistic expression to a greater or lesser extent (Langacker 2008: 110–11). In the case of Joyce’s Ulysses and other stream of consciousness writing, the series of sentences presented can be seen to foreground the sequentially of its processing through time as part of a dynamic construal. For Leech and Short (2007:  177) the basic contrast between syntactic simplicity and complexity is ‘the difference between experiencing events one by one, and experiencing them as an articulate and complex whole’. Developing this account, the CG distinction between sequential and summary scanning enriches our understanding of such syntactic choices, and the impression, in certain narratives, that we are ‘scrutinizing the impulse-driven flow of a character’s mental activity’ (Toolan 2001: 122). Finally, the consequences of dynamicity for meaning can be understood in terms of iconicity. The phenomenon of ‘diagrammatic iconicity’ describes the identification of correspondences between linguistic forms and the conceptual structures they are used to convey (Haiman 1985; Nanny and Fischer 1999; Ungerer and Schmid 2006: 300–311). Such correspondences include the iconic sequencing or juxtaposition of conceptual components through their syntactic arrangement in language. Leech and Short (2007: 190–96) give examples of chronological sequencing, where the order in which events are described reflects the temporal or causal sequence of events in reality (or a fictional world), and psychological sequencing where ‘textual order reflects the order in which impressions occur in the mind’ (2007: 190). The latter, comparable to Enkvist’s (1981) broader experiential iconicity, has often been discussed as playing a role in textual representations of point of view (Müller 1999; Tabakowska 1993, 1999; Burke 2001; Jeffries 2010). Such stylistic effects have clear relevance for mind style. Enkvist’s term experiential iconicity is particularly useful for our purposes due to its emphasis upon iconicity as an interactive textual strategy, and one which includes the iconic juxtaposition (or summation) of entities as well as their sequence (Enkvist 1981:  100). Where such iconically motivated choices create a foregrounded pattern across a text, they often contribute to the experience of a distinctive mind style for a character, narrator or author. Significantly, such iconicity has been said to have affective significance for readers’ experiential engagement with fictional worlds and the perspectives through

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which they are presented (Burke 2001: 46; Jeffries 2010: 96). Leech and Short (2007) describe its effect in the following way: The iconic force in language produces an ENACTMENT of the fictional reality through the form of the text. This brings realistic illusion to life in a new dimension:  as readers we do not merely receive a report of the fictional world; we enter into it iconically, as a dramatic performance, through the experience of reading. (p. 189)

The idea that iconically motivated linguistic choices may contribute to an experience of a worldview that goes beyond comprehension to an immersive, emotive enactment is one that seems particularly relevant for a cognitive stylistic account of mind style. For the remainder of this chapter, I apply this cognitive grammatical approach to the construal presented in The Handmaid’s Tale. The extract from Ulysses analysed in this section has begun to demonstrate the use of concepts such  as prominence and dynamicity to enrich a previous discussion of mind style. The analysis which follows explores the interpretative, iconic effects of these dimensions of construal in a different context and in relation to linguistic patterns observed across the novel as a whole. In the following section, I begin by setting out responses to this text in literary criticism and online reader reviews.

4.4 Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood’s (1985) novel The Handmaid’s Tale has sold millions of copies worldwide in multiple languages, and has been adapted numerous times, including a film (1990), opera (2000), ballet (2013) and TV series (2017). Described as a work of ‘speculative fiction’ by Atwood herself (2005, 2011), and by many of its critics and reviewers (e.g. Dvorak 1998; Howells 2006), the novel can be seen to be centrally concerned with the representation of an imagined other world, and the minds of the individuals within it. The novel presents a near-future version of the United States in which the government has been overthrown by a totalitarian Christian theocracy. In the new church-led regime, named ‘Gilead’, women have been ‘classified’ according to various roles as: ‘Wives’, ‘Handmaids’, ‘Marthas’ and ‘Econowives’. The novel’s main protagonist and first-person narrator, Offred, is a Handmaid – a woman whose enforced duty is to participate in a dehumanizing programme of ritualized sexual intercourse with the Commander (Fred), to whom she has been allocated and accordingly renamed (‘OfFred’). She is highly restricted in her activity outside of this role, is forbidden to read or communicate with other members of society beyond regimented set phrases, and lives in constant fear of punishment by the secret police, the ‘Eyes’, and banishment to the ‘Colonies’ as a labourer, or reclassification as ‘Unwoman’ (Atwood 1996: 20). As the novel progresses, flashbacks into this narrator’s past reveal the fertility crisis which preceded the rise of Gilead, attributed to environmental pollution and liberal social/sexual practices of ‘the time before’ (p. 19). The events leading up to

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Offred’s current situation, including her failed attempt to flee, subsequent capture, and loss of her husband and daughter are gradually revealed as her narrative sporadically returns to her memories of this past. In addition, readers learn of the systematic indoctrination of the regime’s religious and political ideologies by women referred to as ‘Aunts’, through which Offred has been encouraged to accept her new role in this system and participate in its atrocities through violent, public executions referred to as ‘Salvagings’ (p. 42). At the end of the novel, a black van arrives to take Offred away, ambiguously representing either capture, torture and death at the hands of the Eyes, or escape to Canada via the resistance – her ‘salvaging’ or her salvation. Finally, the novel concludes with an epilogue titled ‘Historical Notes’, which presents ‘a partial transcript of the proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies’ taking place in the year 2195 (p. 311). In this satirical representation of academic discourse, the ‘keynote speaker’, Professor Pieixoto, reveals the preceding narrative to be the result of the transcription and decoding of fragments of spoken narrative found on hidden cassette tapes. Pieixoto’s talk, ‘Problems of Authentication in Reference to The Handmaid’s Tale’, exposes issues regarding the narrative’s reliability, including the ‘guesswork’ involved in the ‘arrangement’ of unnumbered fragments into a coherent sequence, the possibility of forgery and, most disturbingly, his own sexist attitudes as transcriber, demonstrated in his joking treatment of Offred and another female academic (pp. 313–6). Pieixoto also provides details as to the possible fates of the characters, suggesting evidence that Offred escaped via an underground military operation and recorded her narrative while in hiding. However, the many uncertainties of this interpretation are made clear to the reader and the novel ends ironically with the question: ‘Are there any questions?’ (p. 324). Atwood’s novel has been interpreted as a reflection upon the act of writing and reading narrative (Bouson 1993; Wilson 1993; Dvorak 1998; Müller 2000; Howells 2005). Critics highlight features associated with postmodernism, including the novel’s fragmented and disordered narrative structure, with its flashbacks, hesitations and retellings, the direct second-person address of the reader, and self-reflexive comments upon the narrative as a ‘reconstruction’, both by the narrator herself (Atwood 1996: 144, 150, 275), and the epilogue. These devices, it is argued, draw attention to the process of storytelling and its subjective imposition of structure upon reality, along with the process of ‘reading clues and unravelling puzzles’ which the readers of this text, like the historians in its epilogue, must undergo in comprehending it (Bouson 1993: 137). Atwood’s novel is said to question the representations through which we make sense of our reality, or ‘the relationship between art and life, historical fact and experiential events, between public and private memory, between fiction and non-fiction’ (Dvorak 1998: 448). Another common concern is the distinctive ‘voice’ of its first-person narrator and its place within the power politics of the novel (Malak 1987; Bouson 1993; Staels 1995; Hogsette 1997; Cooke 1998; Deer 2001; Weiss 2009). Critics often observe connections between the formal patterns of the narrative and the mental states of its narrator: her repression, boredom and starvation of sensual interaction, and, in some cases, identify a distinctive ‘mind style’ for this character (Staels 1995; Müller 2000; Hoover 2016).

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However, the characterization of this narrative voice and the mind it reflects is subject to ongoing debate. As Weiss observes: One of the major areas of debate among scholars of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is the question of Offred’s heroism. Is she a valiant rebel challenging the regime’s domination and oppression? Or is she a powerless victim of Gilead’s oppression? Or is she instead a willing or unwitting participant in the regime? (2009: 120)

In a fictional context in which communication is strictly prohibited for women, Offred’s first-person narrative is viewed by many as an act of resistance, which empowers this narrator through the control it provides over her reality and identity within it (LaCombe 1986; Staels 1995; Feuer 1997; Hogsette 1997; Howells 2005). As Beran (1990:  71) states, ‘Offred’s power is in language’. Such critics highlight the linguistic creativity and word play which characterize her narrative as a means of resistance to the indoctrination of the regime. Through her use of language, Offred is said to defamiliarize the official discourse of Gilead and the religious doctrine upon which it is based (Andriano 1993; Grace 1994; Staels 1995). However, this view of Offred contrasts with another group of readings which view her narrative as that of a powerless victim, broken down by Gilead’s oppressive ideologies (Foley 1990; Bouson 1993: 154; Dopp 1994), and some which regard her more critically, as guilty of complicity in the emergence and continued atrocities of this regime (Stillman and Johnson 1994; Dodson 1997; Weiss 2009). These critics highlight her repeated failure to act both prior to and following the formation of Gilead. Rather than viewing Offred’s narrative as an act of rebellion, these critics instead view it as a form of escapism, which allows her to ignore the injustice and cruelty of the system in which she participates. Finally, for some critics, these alternative interpretations of this narrative voice as at once powerful and powerless, resistant and complicit, coincide within the text, creating an internal contradiction or ‘paradox’ in their experience of this narrator (Malak 1987; Deer 2001; Cooke 1998). For Cooke (1998: 217), the interacting qualities within Offred’s narrative are a ‘deliberate and effective aspect’ of her developing characterization, and the sympathy and identification invited in readers. For academic readers of Atwood’s text, then, the representation of a mind style for Offred is a significant part of their experience of the novel, and their ethical and emotional relationship with its character/narrator. These readings can be interestingly compared with reader responses to the novel on Goodreads. In the following section, I describe my study of these responses, and draw comparisons with the interpretations and experiences reported in academic criticism.

Reader responses to the novel on Goodreads With the goal of obtaining an insight into the experiences of this mind style among a wider range of readers, I carried out a qualitative analysis of a sample of the hundred most recent reviews of The Handmaid’s Tale on the website service, Goodreads (2015c) (this dataset is referred to as GR-1 and individual reviews as R1...R100). Through examination of this dataset, I  identified a number of recurring themes in

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the experiences of the novel described by readers. In practice, this analysis involved a manual consideration of each response in turn, in each case deciding if the response illustrated a theme already identified, or if a new theme was present. For reasons of space, I shall focus my analysis here, and my analyses of the datasets in subsequent chapters, on just those themes (in italics) that are most relevant to mind style. A recurrent theme in the responses is discussion of the aesthetic experience of the writing, including specific comments about its punctuation, sentence structure, description, and imagery. This style receives markedly different evaluations among reviewers, with some praising it as ‘beautiful’ and ‘poetic’, and others criticizing it as ‘confusing’. The examples below reflect these contrasting views of the novel’s style: I guess Margaret Atwood is not the style of literature I like, she tends to lose herself in description, and sometimes it is absolutely unnecesary, I think that the story is engaging and if you can tolerate Margaret’s compulssion on describing things, you will enjoy this book much more than I did. (R39, GR-1) Well written for the most part, but felt like it was trying too hard to sound like good writing. And to push an agenda. It’s a terrifying dystopian world – I’ll give her that – but it just doesn’t seem believable. (R45, GR-1) Full of vibrant imagery. Some people complain of run on sentences but sometimes rules can be broken. Atwood is a poetic mind, these words are written with the intent of being spoken aloud (if only inside our head). There is a rhythm inherent to her words and because it is in character, totally acceptable. (R53, GR-1)

Interestingly, these three reviewers associate the stylistic choices of the novel with the mind of its author as opposed to that of its character/narrator, attributing this style to the characteristic ‘compulssion [sic]’, ‘agenda’ or ‘poetic mind’ of Margaret Atwood as an individual. Looking again at the reviews tagged for this theme, a number of other reviewers seemingly associate its distinctive style with the representation of Offred’s voice or mind style: Although the writing style was confusing at times, and was unnecessarily descriptive at points, it’s a story told by a girl in a screwed up world (R68, GR-1) Atwood paints her story with vivd color and stark frankness, flowing out in an almost stream-of-conscience style from her narrator. Her inventive use of punctuation adds an extra nuance to the dialogue, making it seem rushed, spilled out by the narrator at the moment of her telling. (R66, GR-1) Beautiful writing. Beautiful story [. . .] People are complaining about the lack of quotation marks. Atwood does use speech marks but she leaves them out during the main character, Offred’s, flashbacks as a technique. I must add that I’ve read this for my English lit A2 course (but still would have read it otherwise) so that’s why I noticed this. (R84, GR-1)

As this last reviewer observes, this connection is not one that readers consistently make. Unfortunately, the precise attribution of this style, to the mind of its author or

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character/narrator, is often difficult to distinguish among the reviews more broadly, which frequently comment upon ‘the writing’ generally or use referentially ambiguous pronouns such as ‘she’ or ‘her’. While limited as a result of these ambiguities, and the lack of clarification provided by the characteristically short reviews in which they are contextualized (Section 1.3), this dataset suggests a division among readers as to the attribution of this style. The attribution of an author mind style among some readers of this text, and a mere authorial style in others, contrasts with the almost unanimous attribution of the novel’s stylistic choices to a character/narrator mind style in the literary critical discussion reviewed earlier. References to engagement with the narrator/characters are also found in online reader responses to the novel. Reviewers note the narrative’s alignment of the reader with this character’s perspective: ‘like 1984 you live inside the head of the chief protagonist’ (R5, GR-1) and ‘written in a first person style, in the form of a diary, similar to We’ (R41, GR-1). However, despite this internal perspective, and the empathetic or sympathetic reader experience predicted in narratological and stylistic accounts (Section 2.6), descriptions of any kind of positive or negative relationship with this character are relatively scarce in my dataset. The two examples below reflect the only references to sympathy (sympath*) across my entire sample, and references to empathy (empath*) are not found at all: I sympathized with the main character Offred. A women doing what she could to survive in a country controlled by evangelicals and men. (R37, GR-1) Atwood’s Republic of Gilead was altogether a personal and visceral experience seen through the eyes of Offred, whereas [Brave New World] was a rather more distanced affair. I couldn’t help but to sympathise with Offred, and to wonder how I would have behaved given the same set of circumstances. (R51, GR-1)

This is perhaps surprising given the reported tendency for relationships with characters to be a recurring concern among ‘real’ readers (Miall 2005: 137; Stockwell 2005: 144). Possible explanations for the scarcity of reports of engagement with this character might be identified in the particular characteristics and reading habits associated with the genre of speculative fiction. As described in Section 1.4, speculative fiction is often characterized as a genre in which setting and world building are brought into the foreground, while characters may be less prominent:  regarded as ‘tokens’ used to represent the members of the speculative culture portrayed, or as vehicles for communicating an ideological/social message. Another contributing factor may be the ‘frustratingly complacent’ nature of this character (R80, GR-1) which reviews tagged for this theme state ‘doesn’t do a lot for reader engagement with your story’ (R72, GR1). Variation in readings of this character among literary scholars and Goodreads’ reviewers poses an interesting question for a stylistic account of her mind style. While contrasting in this respect, similarities between the literary critics’ and Goodreads’ responses can be identified in their shared concern with world building, or the way in which the speculative reality or setting is constructed by the narrative. Like the postmodern puzzle-solving experience described by literary critics, Goodreads’

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reviewers comment on the gradual/restricted provision of details in this narrative, its disjointed temporal structure, and the ‘engaging’ or ‘confusing’ experience of this speculative society which results: The author makes the story more engaging by slowly revealing this strictly regimented religious society, the violence used to enforce harsh rules, and the transition from present day to Gilead instead of explaining the rules and history of this new civilization all at once. (R6, GR-1) While We had a very structured approach to the daily life of the Main Character, this novel takes a very disjointed approach to time. It frequently skips around from the characters past before the regime takes over, times directly after and during. However, the narrative is not clear, and is only given out gradually. This can make it quite confusing, but the context of the ‘Diary’ is given at the end which makes it a lot clearer. (R41, GR-1) My only complaint was it was a little hard to follow at times. I got lost a few times. It would jump from present to the past randomly, and she was very vague at describing things sometimes. (R3, GR-1)

Reviewers also comment upon their dis/satisfaction with the ending of the novel, in particular the ‘Historical Notes’ section, and the lack of closure or clarity provided as to their overall understanding of the speculative reality presented. While observing the same disruption to the representation of this reality as that discussed by literary critics, this effect was felt in many of the reviews to be a flaw in the novel which left them unsatisfied: The last chapter which I think was supposed to wrap up the book for the reader did nothing for me as far as comprehending what was going or drawing me to any conclusion in my mind. (R48, GR-1)

For the remainder of this chapter, I shall account for these responses to The Handmaid’s Tale in literary criticism and Goodreads’ reviews, alongside my own reading of the text. Drawing on CG, in Section 4.5, I investigate the distinctive experience of world building invited through its representation of this fictional reality, before going on to account for the varied attributions of these stylistic choices as part of a character, narrator or author mind style.

4.5 World construal in The Handmaid’s Tale The following extract is taken from the opening pages of the novel. It introduces the reader to the immediate surroundings of the narrator through the first-person, present-tense narration which characterizes the majority of the novel: 4a. A chair, a table, a lamp. Above, on the white ceiling, a relief ornament in the shape of a wreath, and in the centre of it a blank space, plastered over, like

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Looking at this extract, certain patterns can be identified in the language of this narrator. There is a noticeably high density of punctuation:  a mixture of commas, full stops, colons, semicolons, n-dashes, which serve to segment the language into graphological units. These are often shorter and more numerous than might be considered normal for written language. While incomplete sentence fragments such as ‘A bed’ and ‘So’ are foregrounded in this respect (Emmott et al. 2006), other heavily punctuated sentences may just strike a reader as being ‘unusually emphatic’ (Leech and Short 2007: 173). In CG terms, the graphological units marked in this way represent attentional frames, or ‘windows of attention’ (see Section 3.6). The use of punctuation here represents a choice of framing, which has significance for the prominence accorded to individual elements of this scene as part of its construal. According to Langacker, ‘dwelling on each clause individually, in a separate attentional gesture, enhances its cognitive salience and that of the elements it contains, if only by according them more processing time and thus a fuller realization’ (2001: 157–8). ‘Squeezing’ multiple

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components into one frame, on the other hand, results in ‘phonological and conceptual “compression”’ (2001: 158). In this extract, we see little such compression, but rather are presented with the different objects in Offred’s surroundings (‘a chair, a table, a lamp’) and the features of these objects (‘a picture, framed but with no glass: a print of flowers, blue irises, watercolour’) one at a time, as the sole focus of our attention. In order to understand the effects of this construal, it helps to look at some of these sentences individually. The opening sentence prompts a mental representation of the text world by evoking prototypes of these familiar objects from readers’ encyclopaedic knowledge. Here, the relationship among these attentional frames (and their highly salient contents) can be seen as a form of asyndetic coordination. In Langacker’s account, coordination reflects the mental juxtaposition of components that are equal in terms of prominence (2009: 353). As such, the linguistic construal of these worldbuilding elements lacks an indication of figure/ground alignment in their invited conceptualization. Further, since there are no prepositions or demonstratives here, they also lack any indication of deictic orientation in time and space, or grounding (Section 3.4), and so float ambiguously in relation to the unknown vantage point of the speaker. However, interacting with such bottom-up linguistic cues, an awareness of the frequent co-occurrence of these objects in a home setting, in a particular spatial arrangement (paralleled linguistically in their presented order from lowest to highest), is likely to be activated top-down from readers’ encyclopaedic knowledge. As a result, a holistic conception, in which ‘a lamp’ is profiled in relation to the layered ground of the other two (as in the lamp on the table above the chair) is likely to be imagined by readers. The complication to summation that this syntax presents, however, reveals a pattern of world construal which continues throughout extract (4a) and, as I shall argue, the entire text. This construal can also be seen in the following sentence. To start with, this sentence profiles a trajector (‘a relief ornament in the shape of a wreath’) against the landmarks of its setting (‘Above, on the white ceiling’). Complicating our conceptualization of this ceiling ornament is (a)  the fact that the landmark is given priority by being presented first (i.e. the ground rather than the figure), and (b) that this trajector then immediately becomes a landmark for ‘a blank space’ within a further profile. Once again, the segmentation of the sentence into its embedded profiles using commas emphasizes the individual salience and sequential scanning of these components. Their decreasing size and increasing granularity is typical of a nested locative – a path of mental access which ‘zooms in’ on a final target (Langacker 2008: 81). Through this dynamic construal, continuing from the opening sentence, this description mimics the process of visual perception it describes, as a form of experiential iconicity. As a result, we gain the impression of a focalized perspective for the main character even before we get to ‘I’. As discussed in Section 4.3, in CG our dynamic conceptualization of language involves a process of summation, or a mental adding up of components we go along. The holistic conception of a single composite structure with ‘a blank space’ as overall trajector is made difficult by the various components of this sentence that compete with it for reader attention. Drawing on CG, the grammatical definiteness of ‘the place’ and

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the newness and empathetic recognizability of the final clause ‘where the eye has been taken out’ may attract attention as different kinds of prominence. Though subordinate, this relative clause is therefore likely to draw the reader’s attention away from the main clause and its ‘blank space’, instead inviting us to focus upon its strange negated figure ‘the eye’ (or figural lacuna; Stockwell 2009: 31) as the final target of scanning. In addition, drawing on stylistic accounts of foregrounding, other kinds of competing prominence can be seen at work here:  the phonetic parallelism (Short 1996:  63) of ‘space’, ‘place’ and ‘face’ causes these profiles to form a foregrounded pattern. Similar phonetic parallelism can be identified for the earlier half rhyme of ‘relief ’ and ‘wreath’, as well as the syntactic parallelism of ‘in the shape of ’ and ‘in the centre of ’. In the latter, the coordinating conjunction ‘and’ contributes to this effect, lending these two relational profiles equal prominence and placing them in parallel. The competing prominence of these components, I would argue, works to complicate readers’ imposition of structure upon this scene. By presenting multiple figures, this sentence disrupts the recognition of graded prominence, or figure/ground alignment, as part of its mental representation. In doing so, this construal can be seen to deny the sense of depth which could otherwise be experienced through such a zooming in effect (Tabakowska 1993: 52; Stockwell 2009: 43). Furthermore, without such structuring, in my reading, conceptualization of the scene described is made difficult. In place of a clear mental representation of this developing text world, emphasis is placed instead upon the independently apprehended meanings of its individual components, and the sequence in which these entities are viewed by the character. Returning to extract (4a) as a whole, this world construal can also be identified in the characteristic description of objects in this setting: falls on the floor, which is made of wood, in narrow strips, highly polished There is a rug on the floor, oval, of braided rags This is the kind of touch they like: folk art, archaic, made by women, in their spare time, from things that have no further use a picture, framed but with no glass: a print of flowers, blue irises, watercolour A bed. Single, mattress medium-hard, covered with a flocked white spread

In each example, a noun (in bold) is modified (or complemented in ‘This is the kind of touch . . .’) through successively apprehended profiles in a list-like form. Here, again, details are framed one by one, in nonrestrictive relative clauses (e.g. ‘which is made of wood’), and a holistic conception of what is described via summary scanning is again made difficult. The conceptualization of each elaborated entity is complicated in this case by the different kinds of component profiles combined, which include processes in past participle form (e.g. ‘highly polished’). Rather than automatically imposing a holistic conception of these things drawn from our encyclopaedic knowledge (of a certain kind of chintzy furnishing style, for example) this construal invites us to follow the thought processes of this narrator through sequential scanning. Close stylistic analysis of this extract therefore suggests a consistent pattern in the construal achieved by the linguistic choices here. This is a highly dynamic construal

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which foregrounds sequential scanning at the expense of summary scanning via a range of syntactic choices. This construal, and the types of linguistic choices which contribute, reflect patterns which persist throughout the novel as Offred describes the immediate circumstances in which she carries out her everyday tasks: 4b. Behind the barrier, waiting for us at the narrow gateway, there are two men, in the green uniforms of the Guardians of the Faith, with the crests on their shoulders and berets: two swords, crossed, above a white triangle. (p. 30) 4c. The room smells of lemon oil, heavy cloth, fading daffodils, the leftover smells of cooking that have made their way from the kitchen or the dining room, and of Serena Joy’s perfume: Lily of the Valley. (p. 90) 4d. The summer dress rustles against the flesh of my thighs, the grass grows underfoot, at the edges of my eyes there are movements, in the branches; feathers, flittings, grace notes, tree into bird, metamorphosis run wild. (p. 161) So far, my analysis has concentrated below the sentence level, looking at the construal achieved by clauses and sequences of clauses. As discussed in Section 3.6, construal also operates at a discourse level. Returning to extract (4a) for now, our mental representation of this scene is one of multiple mental spaces, or text worlds, that are constructed and integrated as we read. For example, we gain insights into the narrator’s memories and beliefs, such as her recollection of the things said to her by Aunt Lydia. Summation of the content of these text worlds into a holistic understanding or world configuration at this discourse level can be seen to involve a comparison between each successively encountered world and those constructed previously: Whenever a text requires us to build more than one text-world, an assessment of each new text-world’s status in relation to those which have preceded it becomes an essential part of our processing of discourse. (Gavins 2007: 76)

In The Handmaid’s Tale a number of linguistic patterns may be seen to influence the reader’s management of this developing discourse structure. First, there is a lack of quotation marks in instances of speech representation, examples of which are seen in extract (4a):  ‘Think of it as being in the army, said Aunt Lydia’, ‘Where I  am is not a prison but a privilege, as Aunt Lydia said, who was in love with either/or’. This lack of quotation marks, together with the delayed placement of the reporting clause, blurs the distinction between direct and indirect speech, or the voices of Aunt Lydia and Offred, respectively. We can say that the ‘world switches’ (Gavins 2007) normally triggered by instances of direct speech are unclear; we are left uncertain whether a world switch has happened at all. As the novel continues, these unmarked world switches develop into a broader tendency for the narrator to suddenly switch between her present situation and remembered situations and events, often within a single paragraph or sentence: 4e. We wait, the clock in the hall ticks, Serena lights another cigarette, I get into the car. It’s a Saturday morning, it’s a September, we still have a car. Other

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people have had to sell theirs. My name isn’t Offred, I have another name which nobody uses now because it is forbidden. (p. 94) 4f. The scratched writing on my cupboard wall floats before me, left by an unknown woman, with the face of Moira. I saw her go out, to the ambulance, on a stretcher, carried by two Angels. (p. 101) Such past situations, as in the instances of direct speech, are ambiguous in their temporal grounding in relation to the primary text world (Langacker 2008: 300) and, increasingly, in their modal grounding in relation to this ‘conceived reality’ (p. 304) as Offred admits the unreliability and uncertainty of her account: 4g. I made that up. It didn’t happen that way. Here is what happened. [. . .] It didn’t happen that way either. I’m not sure how it happened; not exactly. (pp. 273–5) The uncertain reliability of Offred’s account makes the modal grounding of the narrative as a whole, and hence the epistemic assessment of all further worlds in relation to it, increasingly difficult as the novel continues. Other linguistic patterns of significance are Offred’s use of negation and the coordinating conjunction ‘or’. In extract (4a), we see two examples of these being used in a foregrounded manner: ‘nothing takes place in the bed but sleep; or no sleep’ and ‘where I am is not a prison but a privilege, as Aunt Lydia said, who was in love with either/or’. In CG, both negation and the disjunctive coordination represented by ‘or’ encode the mental juxtaposition of mutually exclusive mental spaces (Langacker 2009:  354). Through their combined use here, they invite the reader to attend to a configuration of worlds of considerable complexity. This construal, I  would argue, further disrupts our assessment of the relationships between worlds during discourse processing (Gavins 2007:  49) and raises this imposition of structure to conscious awareness. Parallel to the construal identified below the sentence level, these linguistic choices disrupt our summation of the discourse into a holistic understanding of what it describes. This construal can also be identified in the distinctive use of simile and metaphor seen throughout the narrative. In extract (4h), a succession of similes and metaphors describe the bodies of executed rebels that Offred sees on her morning walk: 4h. What they are hanging from is hooks. The hooks have been set into the brickwork of the Wall, for this purpose. Not all of them are occupied. The hooks look like appliances for the armless. Or steel question marks, upside down and sideways. It’s the bags over the heads that are the worst, worse than the faces themselves would be. It makes the men look like dolls on which faces have not yet been painted; like scarecrows, which in a way is what they are, since they are meant to scare. Or as if their heads are sacks, stuffed with some undifferentiated material, like flour or dough. It’s the obvious heaviness of the heads, their vacancy, the way gravity pulls them down and there’s no life any more to hold them up. The heads are zeros.

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Though if you look and look, as we are doing, you can see the outlines of the features under the white cloth, like grey shadows. The heads are the heads of snowmen, with the coal eyes and the carrot noses fallen out. The heads are melting. But on one bag there’s blood, which has seeped through the white cloth, where the mouth must have been. It makes another mouth, a small red one, like the mouths painted with thick brushes by kindergarten children. A child’s idea of a smile. This smile of blood is what fixes the attention, finally. These are not snowmen after all. (p. 42) This linguistic description disrupts the formation of a holistic understanding of a target entity in this text world (in this case, the bodies) by inviting readers to attend to a succession of diverse source domains (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Here, again we see the narrator’s characteristic attentional framing of her discourse and the repeated coordination ‘Or’ as an invitation to mentally juxtapose these alternative mental spaces. Similar to extract (4a) the individual content of the attentional frames is highly salient in terms of definiteness (‘the heads’, ‘the faces’), newness (in the sense of being varied and original) and empathetic recognizability (being descriptions of human bodies). In terms of stylistic foregrounding, there are also semantic parallelisms to be noticed between the images conjured here, for example, between scarecrows and sacks of flour, dolls’ faces and children’s paintings, which once again complicate our attentional processing, until our attention is fixed, finally, by the figural ‘smile of blood’. By presenting this scene in this way, this dynamic construal foregrounds the thought processes taking place in the mind of the narrator as she attempts to comprehend the scene. In my reading, this construal iconically represents the experience of this horrific situation, as one which defies comprehension through summation. A final linguistic pattern contributing to this construal is the use of epistemic modality. Throughout the novel, alternative versions of events are presented side by side as Offred lists her hypotheses and beliefs about the thoughts and feelings of those around her: 4i. Perhaps he was merely being friendly. Perhaps he saw the look on my face and mistook it for something else. Really what I wanted was the cigarette. Perhaps it was a test, to see what I would do. Perhaps he is an Eye. (p. 28) 4j. Across from us on the other bench, one woman is praying. Or she may not be praying. She may be biting her thumbnails. Possibly she’s trying to keep calm. (p. 122) 4k. He says this as if he believes it, but he says many things that way. Maybe he believes it, maybe he doesn’t, or maybe he does both at the same time. (p. 249) In these extracts, repeated uses of modal adverbs such as ‘perhaps’, possibly’ and ‘maybe’ and the modal verb ‘may’ alongside the conjunction ‘or’, invite us to mentally juxtapose these alternative interpretations of events. In another example of this structure, Offred describes three possible fates of her husband Luke at the hands of this

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regime (pp. 114–15). These three scenarios, in which Luke is dead, imprisoned or free, remain unresolved for the reader, who like the narrator herself must attend to all three: 4l. The things I believe can’t all be true, though one of them must be. But I believe in all of them, all three versions of Luke, at one and the same time. This contradictory way of believing seems to me, right now, the only way I can believe anything. (p. 116) As she faces a similarly ambiguous fate in the concluding pages of the narrative, Offred lists her available options in successive paragraphs beginning ‘I could’: ‘ There are a number of things I could do’ (p. 303). Through this construal, these successively accessed ‘modal worlds’ (Gavins 2007) reflect the failure of an imposition of structure – the perceived asymmetry or graded prominence which would here enable this character to make sense of her situation:  ‘Each one of them seems the same size as the others. Not one seems preferable’ (Atwood 1996:  304). In both examples, the parallel demands upon reader attention posed by this mental juxtaposition of worlds invites us to share the narrator’s ‘contradictory way of believing’ as another form of experiential iconicity. Rather than integrating and weighing these scenarios as part of a hierarchical representation of the text, it is sequential scanning of these equally possible alternative worlds, and ‘toggling’ (Gavins 2007: 152) or ‘alternating’ (Langacker 2009: 342) back and forth, that we must rely upon in our conceptualization of this fictional reality. My analysis of this novel using the CG concepts of prominence and dynamicity has identified a consistent world construal, achieved through a range of linguistic choices working together across the text. Altogether, these linguistic patterns add up to a distinctive experience of the fictional world, characterized by a foregrounded sense of dynamicity and a backgrounded impression of this speculative reality as a coherent whole. Drawing on CG, this experience of the text might also be described in terms of the mental simulation prompted in readers. As described in Section 4.3, sequential scanning is associated with our ‘natural’, real-time processing of events in embodied experience. The foregrounded sequentiality of readers’ processing of this fictional reality, along with its objective construal of its prominent components (e.g. the ‘maximally objective’: ‘a chair, a table, a lamp’ [4a]; Section 3.4), might thus be seen to invite a vivid simulation of this character’s immediate experiences in this text world, and the processes of perception and conception involved. This vivid simulation can be directly contrasted with that invited for the processes beyond this character’s immediate experiences. The processes presented within the situations remembered, imagined or predicted by Offred in world switches and modal worlds are construed in summary fashion, and their participants are typically lacking in prominence. Returning to extract (4a), the frequent use of past participles, for example:  ‘Plastered over’, ‘made of wood’, ‘highly polished’, ‘framed’, ‘covered’, can be seen to impose summary scanning upon these processes, exemplifying an ‘atemporalization’ of these aspects of this wider fictional reality (Langacker 2008: 121). This effect is seen more explicitly in the nominalization of processes in this extract: ‘A return to traditional values’ and ‘Government issue’. By construing these processes

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as abstract ‘things’ (Section 3.4), and so diminishing their dynamicity, this summary construal can be said to invite an attenuated simulation of these processes by readers, as part of their conceptualization of this wider fictional world (cf. Kuzmičová 2012; Sanford and Emmott 2012: 155–7). The experience shared by readers through this construal is described by the narrator later in the novel: 4m. What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of a bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, crisscrossed with tiny roads which lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be. (p. 153) Key to such ‘perspective’, or the ability to comprehend any detail or state in relation to a wider background with the ‘illusion of depth’, I have argued, is the imposition of structure through comparison which allows us to view it holistically. By disrupting such structuring during reading, this construal invites us to share the cognitive experience of a ‘huge foreground’ of details vying for attention, and a resulting restriction to ‘the moment’ through sequential scanning. This experience, evoked through its iconic linguistic construal, and the vivid, but restricted, mental simulation it invites of readers, can be seen therefore to produce what Leech and Short (2007: 189) term an ‘enactment’ of this worldview through the language of the text. This experience of the fictional world can be seen reflected in the reader responses gathered from both literary criticism and Goodreads, described in Section 4.4. The disruption of a holistic conception can be related to the experience of this speculative reality as confusing or unclear reported by readers on Goodreads (Section 4.4). In addition, the enactment of this fictional reality as a ‘huge foreground’ of components or the iconic ‘arrangement of shapes on a flat surface’ can be aligned with critical readings of the novel which describe its experience specifically as that of a ‘puzzle’ (Bouson 1993: 137) or ‘collage’ (Dvorak 1998). The linguistic construal might also be responsible for effects at a yet higher level of discourse structure. Literary critics of The Handmaid’s Tale suggest that its scattered historical and intertextual references (including biblical, literary and fairy tale symbolism) disrupt interpretation of the novel’s contextual significance to form ‘a mosaic or kaleidoscopic pattern of refraction and recurrence’ (Wilson 1993: 3), or ‘a network of resonances that it is up to the reader to piece together’ (Dvorak 1998: 456). By disrupting summation at this intertextual level, alongside the intratextual levels explored here, Atwood’s novel might be seen to raise to attention the subjective imposition of structure involved in the experience of literature more broadly, and the construction of a global understanding which includes an interpretation of theme and cultural/personal significance. Through a CG-informed analysis of this text, such reader experiences, and the linguistic choices responsible, are accounted for and appreciated to a new extent.

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4.6 Attributing a mind style So far, this analysis has considered the effects of syntactic choices (among others) in this novel for readers’ processing and experience of the discourse. One effect it has, in common with Ulysses (Section 4.2) is giving us a sense of Offred’s perceptions and conceptions as they occur through time. This narrative might also be categorized as ‘stream of consciousness’ style, and indeed three readers in my Goodreads’ sample (GR-1) describe it this way. In this section, I discuss the distinctive mind we are invited to attribute based on this style, and the different interpretations made possible by the text. Specific textual cues in the novel invite readers to attribute their experience of the narrative to the way Offred perceives the world around her. First, the prominent sequentiality and disrupted summation invited by this construal can be associated with the restrictions imposed upon her by her circumstances: her rationing of thought (4a), and the physical restriction upon her vision, through the white ‘wings’ that she is required to wear around her face: 4n. Given our wings; our blinkers, it’s hard to look up, hard to get the full view, of the sky, anything. But we can do it, a little at a time, a quick move of the head, up and down, to the side and back. We have learned to see the world in gasps. (p. 40) In addition, the intensely prominent and repetitive focusing upon mundane aspects of her immediate surroundings, can all be seen to reflect her ‘time to spare’, and the ‘paintings about boredom’ which she describes (p.  79). Finally, the fact that the narrative is a transcription of an audio recording, revealed in the epilogue, encourages an attribution of the segmentation and resulting framing of the discourse to the speaking voice of this narrator, on subsequent readings of the text. Through such invited attributions of these linguistic patterns, the experience enacted through its construal can be felt as part of a close, empathetic engagement with this character mind. As discussed in Chapter 2, the attribution of a mind style involves an interpretative distinction between those aspects of worldview that are reflective of the idiosyncratic cognitive habits of an individual and those that are social, cultural or political in origin, that is, reflecting a shared ideological point of view (Semino and Swindlehurst 1996). Following suggestions by Fanlo Piniés (2005) and Stockwell (2009), this distinction was described as a continuum, reflecting an interface between personal and socially shared aspects of worldview (Section 2.4). This continuum is represented in Figure 4.1. However, rather than viewing ‘worldview’ or ‘viewpoint’ as the overarching concept, as in previous discussions, here the two are viewed more specifically as types of cognitive grammatical construal. Modelled in these terms, the relationship between the two ends of this cline can be explored in greater detail. In CG, a construal becomes shared or conventional through repeated use of the linguistic constructions which code it within a particular speech community. The interpretative attribution of a worldview might thus be seen as a positioning of its linguistic construal along

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Figure 4.1. A cline of construals (adapted from Stockwell 2009: 124).

a cline of conventionality. As a linguistic unit becomes conventionalized in CG (represented in Figure 4.1 by the dashed arrow) it becomes increasingly entrenched in memory and undergoes a process of schematization, or a gradual loss of specificity (Section 3.4). This can be compared with suggestions made by van Dijk (1995, 1997) as to the relationship between personal ‘mental models’ and collective ‘ideologies’ (see also Fanlo Piniés 2005). In this account, ‘mental models’ are ‘the experiential basis of generalization, abstraction and decontextualization processes that are involved in the formation of knowledge and attitudes as shared by group members’ (van Dijk 1995: 252). This interpretative distinction has considerable significance for The Handmaid’s Tale. In this text, the attribution of its construal to a mind style or an ideological point of view is made difficult for the reader. As is emphasized by occasional shifts into use of the plural pronoun ‘we’ during Offred’s narrative, seen in extract (4a), the socially imposed restrictions upon her perceptions, thoughts and actions are ones that she shares with other Handmaids. In addition, encouraged by the lack of quotation marks throughout the narrative, the attribution of statements to Offred or to the intrusive voice of Aunt Lydia is at times blurred. In extract (4a), Offred states: ‘I try not to think too much. Like other things now, thought must be rationed. There’s a lot that doesn’t bear thinking about. Thinking can hurt your chances, and I intend to last.’ While this character’s choice to adopt this worldview seems to be personally motivated, ‘thought must be rationed’ also seems like the kind of mantra taught by Aunt Lydia and consequently shared by all Handmaids. Similarly, this narrator’s intense, repetitive focusing upon her mundane surroundings can be interpreted in a number of ways. At the end of extract (4a), she reflects:  ‘But a chair, sunlight, flowers: these are not to be dismissed. I am alive, I live, I breathe [. . .] Where I am is not a prison but a privilege, as Aunt Lydia said’. Once again, this construal is attributable to both the personal resilience of this character and her savouring of sensory experience, or to the indoctrinated gratitude taught by Aunt Lydia. As the novel progresses, a further possible attribution of this construal is invited – to the cowardice of this character and her complicity in the suffering of others: 4o. I’ve seen it before, the white bag placed over the head [. . .] I don’t want to see it any more. I look at the grass instead. I describe the rope. (p. 288)

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These possible attributions of this construal, to the shared ideological point of view of the brainwashed Handmaids or to Offred’s idiosyncratic cognitive habits (as stoic heroine or complicit coward), are invited simultaneously within the narrative. The varied interpretations of this narrator as rebel, victim, perpetrator, or paradoxical combination of all three, seen in the literary critical discussion of the novel (Section 4.4) can be seen as the result of these coexisting textual cues. Furthermore, this text seems to thematize the relationship between the two ends of this interpretative cline, and the processes of entrenchment and schematization involved. As the novel progresses, the interaction between this habitualized ideological point of view and the mind style of this character can be seen in the form of a conflict between two coinciding construals of this fictional reality. During one of her prescribed morning walks, Offred describes the various red objects she encounters: 4p. The red is the same but there is no connection. The tulips are not tulips of blood, the red smiles are not flowers, neither thing makes a comment on the other [. . .] It is through a field of such valid objects that I must pick my way, every day and in every way. I put a lot of effort into making such distinctions. I need to make them. I need to be very clear, in my own mind. (p. 43) Here Offred’s attention to the individual components of this world at the expense of a holistic conception is presented as a refusal as opposed to an inability. Later, in describing her pre-Gilead husband Luke, and her new lover Nick, Offred similarly insists that: 4q. One and one and one and one doesn’t equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged one for the other. They cannot replace each other. Nick for Luke or Luke for Nick. (pp. 201–2) In light of such statements, this narrator’s construal can be seen as reflective not only of her ‘rationed’ thought, or sight in ‘gasps’, but also of a conscious, active maintenance of her ‘own mind’ (4s) and one of the ‘litanies’ she uses to ‘compose [her]self ’ (p. 120). Fittingly, Offred, wearing the prescribed Handmaid’s uniform of red, ‘the colour of blood, which defines us’ (p.  18), is metaphorically one of the equally ‘valid’ red objects (4s) which she persistently distinguishes between through her construal, and which readers themselves distinguish by choosing to attribute this construal to Offred’s individual mind style (The Handmaid of the title) as opposed to the shared ideological point of view of a Handmaid, simultaneously invited by the text. Viewed in the context of a society in which women (and men) are viewed as exchangeable, replaceable commodities for procreation, housekeeping, etc., Offred’s insistence on focused attention to individuals can be interpreted as a direct resistance of the ideological point of view imposed by this social context. The Gileadean ideology and conventional construal which it promotes in its citizens is made explicit later in the novel:

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4r. we must look good from a distance: picturesque, like Dutch milkmaids on a wallpaper frieze, like a shelf full of period-costume ceramic salt and pepper shakers, like a flotilla of swans or anything that repeats itself with at least minimum grace and without variation. Soothing to the eye, the eyes, the Eyes, for that’s who this show is for. (p. 224) The holistic and schematic construal of the Handmaids here, summarily scanned as various collective entities, static on a ‘wallpaper frieze’ or ‘shelf ’, and ‘without variation’ or individual prominence, contrasts directly with the construal which readers are invited to share with Offred through their reading of the text. By inviting readers to conceptualize the text world in this way, Atwood reveals the complex, personal experiences that this ideological point of view, though more ‘soothing’ and ‘picturesque’, abstracts away from. The opposition between these two construals within the text can also be seen dramatized in the instances of word play throughout the narrative. A clear example is Offred’s rethinking of Aunt Lydia’s statement:  ‘Think of yourselves as pearls, says Aunt Lydia [. . .] Pearls are congealed oyster spit’ (p.  124). Such wordplay involves a recognizably conventional construal of women as ‘pearls’, and its subsequent reconstrual in a more specific and revealing manner. Other less explicit examples reveal a similar pattern. From extract (4a), for example, the following two examples might be considered: Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want? For ladies in reduced circumstances. That is what we are now. The circumstances have been reduced.

In both cases, a conventional construal is initially seen in the form of a conventional construction. Both involve an imposition of summary scanning upon the process described, through the use of infinitives in the case of ‘waste not want not’ and the past participle in ‘ladies in reduced circumstances’ (Langacker 2008: 118). Furthermore, in the former, the foregrounded absence of comma intonation, and its mental juxtaposition or ‘compression’ of both processes in a single attentional frame (Langacker 2001: 158), emphasizes the conventionalized summation which such constructions exemplify. In both cases, Offred’s subsequent observations draw out the internal contradictions of these construals: restore their specificity, dynamicity, and a degree of prominence to the unprofiled agents, who remain ominously in the background of this dystopian reality. Applying Forrest’s (1996: 150) term in a literary context, such examples can be seen to reflect this character’s reconstrual of her conceived situation according to her own discourse goals. This text’s construal can thus be seen to reflect the character’s ongoing struggle for individuality in the face of the ideological point of view of her fictional context, as part of a wider criticism of the discursive practices through which our worldviews are structured. My reading of the text thus corresponds most closely with critical interpretations of this character’s voice as resistant, and discussions of the tensions

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presented between the novel’s various discourses (Section 4.4). Contributing to this discussion, a CG analysis of this mind style suggests that readers are invited to enact this resistance as part of their conceptualization of the fictional world. By disrupting the holistic conceptualization of this world as a coherent whole, and the cohesive, meaningful connections which would contribute to a global understanding, the narrative can be seen to actively deny its readers the kind of distanced, ‘soothing’ experience favoured by its Gileadean authorities, who, like the readers, are observers or ‘Eyes’.

4.7 Positioning the reader Through its linguistic construal, the novel therefore invites identification between the reader and its character/narrator, between the reader and the Eyes, and, on a wider scale, between our own society and that presented. It is this self-implicating quality of the narrative, whether interpreted as resistance (as in my reading), oppression, escapist complicity, or a combination of all three, that is responsible for the emotional impact described by Goodreads’ reviewers (Section 4.4). Among the responses to the novel observed in my sample, certain descriptions recur:  ‘disturbing’ (six reviews), ‘terrifying’ (five reviews), ‘chilling’ (five reviews), and ‘depressing’ (three reviews). Notably, readers often describe it as difficult, for these reasons, while also describing it as immersive or hard to put down. These seemingly contradictory experiences of immersion and self-conscious discomfort seem to co-occur as part of a single reading: Wow! Just wow . . . the book is like an automobile accident. You don’t want to see it and you can’t look away. (R99, GR-1) One of the most disturbing books ever. Want to close it and go away. Can’t. Have to finish. Too real for comfort. Too absurd to believe. Made my skin crawl. Read it. (R100, GR-1) This story was both a fantastic and horrible; as it is literary gold while making your insides curdle. I cautiously recommend it with the forewarning that readers must prepare themselves for frustration. (R63, GR-1)

As was proposed in Section 3.8, such conflicting experiences of the text world, and the self-conscious reading experience that they suggest, can be accounted for in terms of the CG model of perspective, and the variable distribution of prominence it allows between an objective and subjective construal. Positioned between these two extremes of immersion in and alienation from the text world, such reader experiences can be described as involving a degree of attention to the vantage point, feelings, and bodily sensations of the reading-self as the subject of conception within the ground. The perspective of this construal, or the relationship between reader and character it cues, has further significance in this text. A second interpretative distinction which

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readers must make is that between a view of this construal as a reflection of the cognitive habits of Offred, or as a rhetorical strategy in her role as first-person narrator (Section 2.4). Within the CG approach developed in this book, this distinction within mind style corresponds to an attentional focus upon different axes of construal during interpretation (Section 3.4; Figure 3.1): upon the role of linguistic choices in structuring the conceived situation (the ‘ideational metafunction’ in Hallidayan terms), or the perspectival relationship between this situation and the conceptualizers in the ground (the ‘interpersonal metafunction’). Here, the grounding of Offred’s narrative can be identified in her extensive use of proximal deixis (e.g. ‘this’, ‘now’ in extract [4a]), epistemic modality (‘perhaps’ [4i], ‘possibly’ [4j], ‘maybe’ [4k]), self-conscious references to her role as narrator (e.g. ‘I don’t want to be telling this story’ [p. 237]), and direct address of a reader (‘you’ [4a]). Such strong grounding contributes to a prominent construal of her narrating-self in what Romberg (1962: 9) terms the ‘epicsituation’ of her first-person narrative, and a particular kind of emotional and ethical relationship with the reader in terms of intimacy and authority. Specifically, applying the adapted CG construal configuration set out in Section 3.8, it draws attention to the relationship between the narrator-enactor of Offred and her narratee in a mediating narrative level such as that depicted in Figure 3.8. By directing attention to this ground in this way, placing this intervening narrator-conceptualizer ‘onstage’, the text invites an attribution of its construal to the rhetorical strategy of this unreliable narrator, alongside the embodied experiences of her character-enactor in the situations described. In this way, the text again invites different interpretations of this mind style, this time with regard to the interpersonal relationship it establishes with the reader. Critics have highlighted the coinciding textual cues that characterize Offred as an innocent experiencer, providing an unmediated report or ‘confession’ to the reader (Cooke 1998), and at the same time as a ‘powerful user of language, a poet and rhetorician’ (Deer 2001: 94). For some readers, such as the Goodreads’ reviewers seen in Section 4.4, the attention to a strategic writer invited by this subjective construal might instead result in an awareness of the author and her choices as writer. By focusing attention at this lowest level of the narrative’s discourse structure (opposite to that represented in Figure 3.9), these linguistic choices are then attributed to an author mind style or style, as opposed to the character. Attention to this reader–author interaction in the ground is further increased by the ‘Historical Notes’ which end the novel. Returning to my development of the construal configuration (Section 3.8), the revelation of the historians’ roles in transcribing and decoding Offred’s narrative inserts a further intervening narrative level (or perhaps several) between the ground containing the author and reader, and that containing the character. For readers such as myself, who experience this mind style as part of an empathetic engagement with Offred, this reconstrual creates a new sense of distance in relation to this character. In terms of my CG model, it redistributes reader attention and lends the construal of this fictional reality further subjectivity, or an increased prominence to the various conceptualizers through which Offred’s experiences are mediated, at the expense of these experiences themselves.

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Finally, the novel ends by drawing attention to our own role as readers in this ground. The ethical judgement we are invited to make of the characters is highlighted by the conspicuous neutrality of Professor Pieixoto: 4s. If I may be permitted an editorial aside, allow me to say that in my opinion we must be cautious about passing moral judgement upon the Gileadians. Surely we have learned by now that such judgements are of necessity culture-specific. Also, Gileadean society was under a good deal of pressure, demographic and otherwise, and was subject to factors from which we ourselves are happily more free. Our job is not to censure but to understand. [Applause.] (p. 315) This ending is seen to present readers with ‘an example of how not to read Atwood’s novel’ (Hogsette 1997:  263), which ‘commit[s] the historians’ sin of viewing the individual only as an example of the larger, more abstract point’ (Feuer 1997: 85). In CG terms, it schematizes Offred’s experiences through an act of summation, much like that of the Gileadeans themselves. Through this ironic ‘editorial aside’, Atwood draws attention to our own act of reading of the text, and the ethical position we adopt in doing so.

4.8 Conclusion This chapter has investigated the insights to be gained through an application of CG in the analysis of a mind style. It has demonstrated this approach’s ability to account for, and go beyond, existing interpretations of mind style, first, in relation to an extract from Ulysses, previously analysed by Fowler (1977) and, second, in The Handmaid’s Tale, an extensively discussed speculative fiction novel in terms of perspective and characterization. In both cases, linguistic choices at the level of syntax have been said to achieve a ‘stream of consciousness’ effect for the novel’s main character. CG offers an explicit, psychologically plausible explanation for this effect in terms of our attentional processing of language, and enables the identification of further linguistic features which contribute. As well as providing a point of comparison in terms of style, analysis of these two texts illustrates the very different interpretations that can result from similar syntactic choices, and their resultant processing, in context. Building on previous discussions of iconicity with regard to literary discourse by Leech and Short (2007), I have argued that the linguistic choices contributing to mind style invite an emotive ‘enactment’ of the fictional world as a form of ‘experiential iconicity’ (Enkvist 1981). This description specifies the recognition or ‘impression’ of a mind style described in earlier accounts (Fowler 1977) and enriches our understanding of this reading experience from a cognitive stylistic perspective. Support for this enactment with regard to The Handmaid’s Tale was obtained here through examination of responses to the text from literary criticism and a wider sample of online readers. Comparison of these sets of responses reveals interesting commonalities and differences between readers in these contexts, which raises further questions for discussions of mind style. One significant observation that has arisen here is the range of attributions

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of mind style by readers: to author, narrator and character. These attributions co-exist in the responses and would appear to be invited simultaneously by linguistic patterns in the text. In light of the increasing concern with real readers in stylistics, such varied interpretations, and the processing that underpins them, should be incorporated and accounted for as part of a discussion of mind style. In Chapter 5 I continue to develop this CG approach, focusing upon the text-driven application of reader knowledge within our conceptualization of a fictional world, and its contribution to the experience of a mind style in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005).

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5.1 Introduction A further set of linguistic choices which can contribute to a mind style concerns the vocabulary used by a character, narrator or author. In Fowler’s account, ‘the lexis of a person, or of a discourse, or of a society, can be regarded as mapping the conceptual repertoire of the person (etc.) concerned’ (1996: 215). In this chapter, I explore this effect in light of current understandings of language and conceptual structure in CG, this time building on work in cognitive stylistics that has already made significant steps in this direction. I examine accounts of mind style using schema theory, before outlining a further cognitive development applying the CG concepts of focusing, specificity and the related notion of reference point relationships. These concepts provide a psychologically plausible and stylistically detailed model of the inferences we make about a character’s knowledge based on the words they use. The analysis of The Handmaid’s Tale in Chapter  4 investigated the creation of a mind style through the distinctive manner in which its fictional world is construed. This chapter considers different, but related, dimensions of world construal. While the previous chapter can be seen to examine world construal from the bottom-up, this chapter examines the same process from the top-down. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), I argue, it is the way in which reader knowledge is activated and applied during the conceptualization of the fictional world, which is responsible for the enactment of a mind style for its first-person narrator. After comparing responses to this novel in literary criticism and reader reviews on Goodreads in Section 5.4, in Sections 5.5 and 5.6 I use the CG model of focusing alongside a compatible stylistic account of its opposite:  burying to account for readers’ reported experiences. Finally, in Section 5.7, I apply a further aspect of construal, specificity, in order to account for the felt experience of this mind style during reading and its contribution to readers’ overall responses to the text.

5.2 Under/over-lexicalization In discussions of mind style, the lexical choices made by an author, narrator or character are often interpreted as indicators of the knowledge they possess. According to Fowler, this reflects our wider tendency to assume that a speaker/writer’s vocabulary

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reflects the concepts or categories for which they have a name, while the lack of a word suggests that ‘the individual does not have access to the concepts concerned, or has difficulty of access’ (1996: 216). Such folk psychological assumptions are manipulated in literary texts through lexical choices that are foregrounded against those expected, or typically shared within a speech community. First, as defined by Fowler (1996: 216), under-lexicalization describes the noticeable absence of a conventional expression, or substitution of a less appropriate (e.g. more generalized) expression. Fowler suggests that this technique can lead to the impression of a lack of knowledge, naiveté or evasiveness as part of a mind style. On the other hand, over-lexicalization describes a repetitive use of terms, or specific references to similar concepts, and is said to be responsible for the impression of particular areas of interest, or obsession, in a character. Contributing to these two kinds of foregrounding are dimensions of lexical choice such as specificity/generality, abstractness/concreteness and register-specific connotations (Fowler 1996). In Halliday’s (1971) analysis of The Inheritors, discussed in Section 1.2, uses of ‘general nouns’ such as ‘stuff ’ or ‘things’ as opposed to more specific terms represent an under-lexicalization, which is said to indicate the Neanderthal character’s lack of understanding of the entities he encounters. Developing this account from a cognitive stylistic perspective, Semino (2002, 2007) and Fanlo Piniés (2005) have applied schema theory as a means of specifying this effect (Bartlett 1932; Schank and Abelson 1977; Rumelhart 1980). Schema theory offers a model of conceptual structure in terms of ‘organised packets of information about the world, events or people stored in long-term memory’ (Eysenk and Keane 2010: 401). In addition, it offers an account of the processes through which such knowledge participates in comprehension and learning in terms of an interaction between topdown processing guided by our preexisting knowledge and expectations, and bottomup processing guided by incoming information (Rumelhart and Ortony 1977; van Dijk and Kintsch 1983; Fiske and Neuberg 1990). Further, schema theory accounts for the way in which our knowledge structures change or evolve through encounters with new stimuli, describing processes of ‘accretion’, ‘tuning’ and ‘restructuring’ (Rumelhart and Norman 1978; Rumelhart 1980: 52–4) and, in applications to literature, various forms of schema refreshment (Cook 1994; Semino 1997; see Section 2.6). Applying schema theory to mind style, Semino (2002) analyses the following passage, among several others, from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin: A sort of white mushroom was drifting down with a tiny man suspended underneath, and what was marvellous about it was that the rising sun was glinting from the silk before it had had time to become more than a suspicion of a glow upon the horizon. Alekos stood up and watched it with fascination. Perhaps it was an angel. It was certainly garbed in white. He crossed himself and struggled to remember a prayer. He had never heard of an angel that floated about below a mushroom, but you never knew. And it seemed that the angel had a big rock, perhaps a package, hanging from his feet on a rope. (de Bernières 1999: 333)

Interpreting a mind style for the focalizing character Alekos, Semino suggests that ‘the way in which events are narrated, and particularly the use of vocabulary, suggests

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the point of view of somebody who is not an entirely reliable reflector, due to a lack of knowledge and a rather simple mind’ (2002: 101). Drawing on schema theory, Semino describes the noticeable absence (or under-lexicalization) of references to entities such as parachute, soldier or grenade here as suggesting the lack of a relevant WAR schema in the mind of its focalizing character (2002: 102). Further, she goes on to describe the way in which this knowledge is applied, adapted and developed during this character’s comprehension of his surroundings. The ‘main peculiarity’ of Alekos’ mind style is said to arise from the distinctive manner in which he applies an ANGEL schema in comprehending his situation, through ‘relentless top-down processing’ and the way that he adapts this schema to accommodate new information, in ‘a less extreme (and, in this case, less adequate) form of schema refreshment than potentially required by the situation’ (2002: 104). This analysis offers a significant cognitive specification and enrichment of Fowler’s account. What is missing, however, is explicit discussion of the reader processing that gives rise to this impression of ‘peculiarity’, and how the variable knowledge of readers (of Christianity and World War II, for example) might affect their experience of this mind style. While schema theory can be seen to provide an inherently reader-oriented approach to texts (Semino 2001: 348; Stockwell 2003: 269), schema-based analyses of mind style (e.g. Semino 1997, 2002) have typically focused upon description of the character mind in these terms and have devoted less attention to readers’ minds (and schemata), and their interaction with the worldview presented (Jeffries 2001:  331; Miall 2005: 148). In subsequent work, Semino (2007) presents a more reader-focused analysis of mind style in schema theory terms. Developing an earlier analysis by Leech and Short (1981), she discusses a mind style presented in the opening of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury: Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming towards where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass. (1929: 1)

Here, the lack of references to entities such as tee, golf, club is said to suggest that the narrator Benjy lacks a GOLF schema for this area of experience. Importantly, Semino goes on to explain that this effect comes about by causing a failure or delay in the activation of this schema for readers and a disruption to comprehension, creating a sense of defamiliarization (Semino 2007: 159; see also frame blocking in Margolin 2003: 277). Rumelhart (1980: 48) identifies such failed or delayed activation of a schema as one of three ways in which comprehension may be impaired during reading. Problems may also arise if a reader finds a coherent interpretation through the activation of a schema different to that of the author (and, by extension, the narrator or character), or if a reader lacks the appropriate schema being cued. Applying this account to mind style,

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three possibilities can be identified in the relationship between reader and character minds with regard to schematic knowledge: A: the character fails to activate a schema possessed by the reader; B: the character activates a different schema to that activated by the reader; C: the character activates a schema lacked by the reader. While Benjy’s mind style illustrates type A, Alekos’s mind style most closely exemplifies type B: the activation of an alternative schema in the reader. While this is said to lead to a failure of comprehension in Rumelhart’s (1980) account, this is not the case here, as readers are seemingly able to comprehend the scene from both perspectives at once. Jeffries (2001) argues that readers may hold multiple alternative schemata for a given situation from different points of view, which will vary in ‘dominance’ according to cultural and personal factors in worldview (see a similar suggestion by Schank and Abelson 1977: 42). This leaves Rumelhart’s third type of comprehension disruption: a reader’s lack of the relevant schema, and type C in its application to mind style. This relationship is particularly significant for the alternative worlds of speculative fiction and is a common source of the puzzle-solving experience described in Section 1.4 (Stockwell 2003). This interaction between reader and character knowledge will form the starting point for my analysis later in this chapter. However, schema theory, and its application to literature, faces a number of fundamental problems. A pressing question for schema theory concerns the delineation of the precise content of schemata and the boundaries between them (Thorndyke and Yekovich 1980:  41; Semino 1997:  149; Culpeper 2001:  70; Stockwell 2003:  261; Eysenk and Keane 2010: 405). The difficulty in identifying schemata and in therefore generating testable predictions may be a consequence of their inherently dynamic nature:  constantly restructured in the course of our everyday cognitive activities (Semino 1997: 149; see also Bartlett 1932: 200) and formulated online for the purposes of discourse (Schank 1982; Edwards 1997). In light of such issues, Rumelhart et  al. (1986) propose a reworking of schema theory in terms of parallel distributed processing. In this connectionist model, schemata correspond to ‘coalitions of tightly interconnected units’ distributed across a neural network (1986:  20). In this account there is no distinct representation or ‘thing’ (1986: 20) stored in memory for a given situation (etc.), but rather patterns of activation or ‘connection strengths’ between units corresponding to constituent elements: This difference is important – especially with regard to learning. There is no point at which it must be decided to create this or that schema. Learning simply proceeds by connection strength adjustment. (Rumelhart et al. 1986: 21)

Such a development of schema theory (see also Kintsch 1988) is not a definitive answer to the question of knowledge organization. The computational connectionist theory upon which such models rest is still speculative, and is faced with a number of limitations as an account of human cognition (Semino 2001: 353; Eysenk and Keane

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2010:  27). The concept of knowledge networks, however, provides an alternative to the problem of schema identification, replacing the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ existence of a schema with discussion of the connection strengths between components (Rumelhart et  al. 1986:  37). Rumelhart et  al. see the relationship between their model and previous versions of schema theory as ‘largely a matter of levels of analysis’ (1986:  56). The benefits of such a refinement of schema theory for the analysis of mind style will be returned to in Section 5.3. Another problem for schema theory of significance to its literary application is its lack of detail as to the (textual) conditions under which schemata are activated during processing (Thorndyke and Yekovitch 1980: 45; Eysenk and Keane 2010: 406). In their artificial intelligence model, Schank and Abelson (1977:  46–50) propose that for a script to be instantiated at least two ‘headers’ or cues must be seen within the text. They identify four specific categories of headers: ‘precondition headers’, ‘instrumental headers’, ‘locale headers’ and ‘internal conceptual headers’, which vary in likelihood of script activation. If only one such header is seen, they suggest, the script will be noninstantiated, forming a fleeting script (1977:  47). While providing a workable account of schema activation, the extent to which such ‘rules’ can be transferred from computer programming to human cognition is debatable (Cook 1994:  19; Semino 1997:  136; Culpeper 2001:  69). Most significantly for its literary application, this model is insensitive to stylistic differences among such textual cues (Cook 1994: 197; Semino 1997: 155; Stockwell 2003: 260) and the range of discursive factors that may determine the schemata activated as a result (Culpeper 2001: 67–8). CG, I shall argue, offers a framework for the analysis of knowledge activation and development, in both characters and readers, in stylistically detailed terms.

5.3 Character and reader knowledge in cognitive grammar In CG, specific lexical choices have significant consequences for knowledge activation. In the CG account of focusing, linguistic forms do not activate schemata (or, in CG, ‘domains’) whole, but rather provide a variable scope of access to a matrix of such structures in memory (Section 3.4). Applied to literature, this model enables a finergrained consideration of reader knowledge, not as instantiated/noninstantiated, but as involving varying degrees of focusing within a foreground and background. Another useful CG concept here is that of reference point relationships (Section 3.4). In its broadest sense, the reference point model reflects ‘the omnipresent experience of invoking one conceived entity in the process of establishing mental contact with another’ (Langacker 1991: 173). Applying this model to the knowledge focused as part of a linguistic construal, the specific content profiled by an expression is a reference point that affords access to multiple targets in a dominion of schematic knowledge. This CG account offers a refinement of schema theory which is in line with suggestions by Rumelhart et al. (1986) and other connectionist models of cognition (see also Evans 2009a).1 Indeed, Langacker (2008: 10) explicitly states the compatibility of his model with connectionist theories. Viewed in this way, he suggests, the profile

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(or reference point) of an expression might be understood as a ‘node’ in a neural network of relations to which it provides access via ‘spreading activation’, and the conventionalized meanings of linguistic units viewed as ‘entrenched cognitive routines’ (Langacker 1987:  162–6). What sets this CG model apart from other connectionist theories of knowledge structure is that this is tied to a detailed grammatical framework. As discussed in Section 3.4, the subtle difference of meaning for words such as cook and chef can be accounted for in terms of their variable focusing of interlinked domains within this network, for example, HOME and RESTAURANT. In addition, the type of processing described by reference point relationships can also account for a range of discourse-level phenomena, such as cohesion and coherence (van Vliet 2009). In this model, possible targets within focused knowledge domains interact in top-down fashion with the bottom-up information (e.g. anaphoric pronouns) encountered sequentially across discourse. Developing this discourse-level application, Stockwell (2009, 2014a, 2014b) and Harrison (2017) have extended the reference point model to discuss the role of readers’ encyclopaedic knowledge during the online processing of literary texts. Here, as represented in Figure 5.1, the dominion is a network of potentially relevant knowledge which is progressively built up by a chain of reference points (RP) within a text, and through which readers trace a mental path. Significantly, the targets accessed in this dominion include not only conventional meanings for an expression, but also personal, experiential associations, intertextual connections and register-specific connotations which, following Langacker (2008:  57), are ranked according to their centrality, or likelihood of activation. By recognizing the ‘looser’ (or less central) connections traced between references in this way, Stockwell (2009:  182) argues, the linguistic choices contributing to cohesion may be extended beyond those categories outlined in systemic-functional grammar (Halliday and Hasan 1976), and reader experiences of coherence understood in more flexible, psychologically plausible terms. This model provides a means of describing the ‘text-driven’ application of reader knowledge proposed in text world theory (Stockwell 2009: 182; Giovanelli 2014: 155). The targets cued by the reference points within a text can be seen to flesh out our conceptualization of the text world according to the principle of minimal departure – the idea that we ‘will project upon [the text world] everything we know about reality, and we will make only the adjustments dictated by the text’ (Ryan 1991: 51). Developing this application, Stockwell (2009: 182) outlines a ‘typology of reference’, or different ways

Figure 5.1. Dominion tracing through texts (based on Stockwell 2009: 180).

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in which knowledge targets can be evoked, invoked or revoked in memory, according to our attentional processing of the reference points in a text through maintenance, distraction, occlusion, and neglect (see also Harrison 2017:  55). By modelling the ways in which knowledge may persist, fade out and reenter attention during reading, the fleshing out of a text world through the principle of minimal departure gains a necessary temporal dimension, which corresponds to readers’ dynamic bottom-up scanning of the textual cues themselves, as described in Chapter 4. Significantly, in this account, not all potentially relevant knowledge will contribute directly (or equally) to the text world in this way. Some targets will remain in the dominion, or ‘periphery of consciousness’ (Croft and Cruse 2004: 50) until realized by the text. This reference point model, combined with the division of focused knowledge into foreground and background described earlier, thus allows us to distinguish systematically between knowledge that is directly cued within the text as part of our mental representation of the fictional world, and that which contributes only as part of the background. In her application of schema theory to poetry, Semino (1997: 190) observes that partial, or semiactivated ‘secondary schemata’, or ‘fleeting scripts’ (Schank and Abelson 1977: 47), may contribute significantly to comprehension and text world construction. Such noninstantiated knowledge might be seen as responsible for a range of specific experiential effects, such as atmosphere (Stockwell 2009, 2014a, 2014b), irony (Giovanelli 2014: 156) and, as I shall argue here, mind style. In addition, this model allows us to look closely at the process through which readers incrementally update such knowledge during text world construction. Specifically, it offers a direct development of the process of ‘reference updating’, which in text world theory is said to operate alongside ‘deixis updating’ and ‘predication updating’ in the progressive modification of a text world (Werth 1999: 311; Giovanelli 2013: 26). Werth models this process as the formation of connections between text world entities and aspects of underlying frame knowledge through reference chaining of linguistic forms (Werth 1999: 158). The reference point model offers a psychologically plausible account of this processing, which is a less developed aspect of Werth’s account, and provides a basis for predicting the linguistic cues likely to participate in such chains. In CG, the criteria for reference points and targets are clearly defined: The likelihood of a nominal being invoked as reference point depends on its prominence, and the likelihood of an element being included in its dominion depends on the closeness of their conceptual connection. (Langacker 2008: 509)

The determination of which linguistic form will act as a reference point is thus predictable in terms of figure-ground (van Hoek 2003: 182; Giovanelli 2014: 155) and, specifically, the kinds of prominence discussed in Section 3.4 (see also Chapter  4). Second, predictions might be made for targets on the basis of conventional association through collocation within a representative corpus for a given speech community. In considering the connection between prominence and reference points, an interesting comparison can be made with recent cognitive stylistic insights into foregrounding. Drawing on findings in psycholinguistics, Sanford and Emmott (2012:  86) propose that the level of attention to a linguistic form during narrative

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processing has a number of psychological consequences. Specifically, they suggest, heightened attention increases: 1. 2. 3. 4.

the ease with which we access the information it cues in memory; the strength of its representation in memory; the degree of detail of this representation, or ‘depth’ of processing; the likelihood of its comprehension featuring a mental simulation. (summarized from Sanford and Emmott 2012: 86)

Notably, the kinds of foregrounding discussed by Sanford and Emmott, and in subsequent work by Emmott and Alexander (2014), extend far beyond the deviant linguistic choices which are often the focus of stylistic accounts (e.g. Short 1996; McIntyre and Price forthcoming). Here foregrounding includes ‘standard [or nondeviant] systemic choices’ such as grammatical (non)subordination which have ‘some impact in terms of noticeability’, as well as discourse-level strategies relating to ‘narrative world salience’ and ‘text position’ (Emmott and Alexander 2014:  330– 31). This extended discussion of foregrounding is compatible with the CG concept of prominence, which combines various forms of grammatical and conceptual/ experiential salience (Langacker 1993:  324; Stockwell 2009:  26). Relating Sanford and Emmott’s account to that developed here, the psychological consequences listed might be regarded as potential effects of the conceptual reference point focused by a prominent linguistic form, and the range of accessible targets it cues in encyclopaedic memory. Extending this comparison, it is participation in reference point chains that perhaps gives foregrounded linguistic features their ‘extra meaning’, or significance, as part of our overall interpretation of a text (Emmott and Alexander 2014: 329). Sanford and Emmott (2012:  92) also highlight the importance of the opposite effect: the ‘deliberate backgrounding’ or burying of information within a text through reduced attention. Developing this argument, Emmott and Alexander (2014: 332) set out eleven narrative strategies for burying, which are summarized below: i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. vii. viii. ix. x. xi.

Mention the item as little as possible; Reduce the item’s prominence linguistically; Underspecify the item so that its component parts are less prominent; Place the item next to one that is more prominent; Make the item appear unimportant in the narrative world; Separate/distribute references to the item; Place item in a position where reader is distracted or not yet interested; Stress one part of the item so that other parts become less prominent; Give the item a false significance so that its real significance is less prominent; Have the characters say that the item is uninteresting; Discredit the characters reporting the item so that the item is less prominent.

These strategies, I suggest, reflect antiprominence techniques as part of a construal, or means of reducing the likelihood that a profiled entity will participate in a reference point chain during reading. Emmott and Alexander (2014: 330–31) describe the effects

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of burying in terms of a control of inferencing. In CG terms, by preventing the item from acting as a reference point, these strategies will inhibit the formation of inferences from focused knowledge and the connections with earlier/subsequent reference points necessary for its contribution to a developing interpretation. For the remainder of this chapter, I will show how such burying strategies, and the knowledge focusing and chaining they manipulate, can contribute to the creation of a mind style as part of the construal of a fictional world. In Section 5.4, I introduce Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and responses to the text in literary criticism and online reviews which are indicative of a mind style.

5.4 Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go (2005) received widely positive reviews on publication and has since been the basis for a film (2010). Often compared with The Handmaid’s Tale, the novel is sometimes regarded as science fiction (Mirsky 2006: 628; MacDonald 2007:  76; Toker and Chertoff 2008:  173; Griffin 2009:  660) or ‘Quasiscience fiction’ (Menand 2005; Jerng 2008). Like the other texts analysed here, this text shares a concern with the psychological and ethical implications of an alternative reality, which can be usefully examined in terms of mind style. The novel is set in a counterfactual version of England in the 1990s, and describes the life of Kathy H, a thirty-one-year-old ‘carer’ (Ishiguro 2010:  3). Kathy, the novel’s first-person narrator, recounts her childhood in an English boarding school called ‘Hailsham’. As the novel continues, it becomes apparent that the children at Hailsham are in some way ‘special’ (p. 68, original emphasis): different from their teachers (or ‘guardians’) and the people ‘outside’ (p. 41). Readers slowly learn that Kathy and the other ‘students’ are actually human clones, being reared as part of a government programme until they reach maturity and donate their vital organs to medical science. Following their education at Hailsham, the clones spend a few years in a pseudo-version of university referred to as ‘The Cottages’, before going on to work as ‘carers’, taking care of fellow clones in ‘recovery centres’ as they donate their organs one-by-one, until they are called up to become ‘donors’ themselves. Though the characters imagine ‘dream futures’ working in offices or shops (p. 140) and the possibility of a ‘deferral’ for those in loving relationships (p.  150), these hopes are revealed to be fantasies, tragically distanced from the single future set out for them. For the majority of clones, their fourth ‘donation’ ends in ‘completion’, or premature death. In the final chapters of the novel, Kathy and fellow clone Tommy visit one of their former guardians, Miss Emily to request a deferral, only learn in the (anti)climax of the novel that the deferral process was mere rumour and there is no hope for extending their time together (pp. 251–67). The characters also learn of Hailsham’s true purpose and the wider social context in which it was situated. Hailsham was a charity-run organization which aimed to provide a humane alternative to the ‘deplorable conditions’ in which clones were reared in other government-run centres, and to prove to the general public who endorsed this system that the clones ‘had souls’ (p. 255, original

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emphasis). Finally, this exchange reveals a further purpose to Hailsham: to submit the young clones to a kind of psychological conditioning, a carefully controlled restriction of knowledge, which ‘sheltered’ them from the terrible future awaiting them: You see, we were able to give you something, something which even now no one will ever take from you, and we were able to do that principally by sheltering you. Hailsham would not have been Hailsham if we hadn’t. Very well, sometimes that meant we kept things from you, lied to you. Yes, in many ways we fooled you. I suppose you could even call it that. (p. 263, original emphasis)

Like The Handmaid’s Tale, the novel’s alternative to contemporary society is often explored in terms of its treatment of sociopolitical issues. The novel has been read by literary critics as a contribution to bioethical debates in response to scientific developments in cloning and organ donation (Montello 2005; Mirsky 2006; Sim 2006; Griffin 2009). Others, however, regard the novel as centrally concerned with broader, ‘more literary’ themes (Kerr 2005: 1) such as friendship, memory, identity, and ‘what it means to be human’ (Shaddox 2013: 451). The experiences of the clones have been interpreted as a commentary upon freedom and control within social institutions, class systems, and the welfare state (Robbins 2007; Currie 2009; Whitehead 2011). More broadly, Kathy’s coming-of-age narrative is often viewed as a metaphor for the human condition, which captures the daily trivialities with which we distract ourselves from our mortality (Harrison 2005; Wood 2005; Clark 2006; Mullan 2009; Atwood 2011; Bizzini 2013). In some reviews, on the other hand, Ishiguro’s clone characters are viewed as a challenge to our definition of the human condition. Jerng (2008:  370) argues that the novel raises ‘larger questions concerning the kind of life that counts as life, the kind of form that is sufficient or necessary to make one a human, and the forms of individuation that are possible for “clones” ’. For Black (2009), Ishiguro’s representation of these distinctly ‘inhuman’ characters invites us to expand our capacity for empathy. An aspect of the novel often highlighted in such discussions is its gradual revelation of the characters’ identities as clones, as ‘gradually, through Kathy’s rosytinted retrospect, the contours of a horrific situation loom’ (Kemp 2005). This reading experience is said to directly parallel the ‘education’ of the characters themselves (McDonald 2007:  76; Black 2009:  792). At a key point in the novel, Miss Lucy, one of the guardians at Hailsham says: ‘The problem, as I see it, is that you’ve been told and not told. You’ve been told, but none of you really understand’ (p. 79). Toker and Chertoff (2008: 163) describe a first-time reading of the novel as a ‘non vicarious reenactment of the cognitive part of the characters’ experience’: The main educational technique through which the students are brought to accept their fate consists of causing awareness to grow upon them gradually – as it similarly gradually grows upon the reader. In retrospect, neither the children nor the reader can tell exactly when they received the first unambiguous indication as to the purpose of Hailsham. It is as if they have known this crucial fact all along but without knowing that they knew. (p. 167)

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Critics regularly emphasize the chilling impact of this narrative technique, describing its ‘icy slivers of menace’ (Wood 2005) or ‘barely articulated horror’ (Clark 2006). For Moore (2005), ‘the novel’s characteristic impact [. . .] is made up, not of the shock of one revelation, but of successive trickles of cold dismay’. The truth, it is suggested, exists in the periphery of consciousness during reading: in ‘the shadows of things not said, glimpsed out of the corner of one’s eye’ (Moore 2005), or in ‘what does not appear – what lurks on the fringes of the narrative’ (Black 2009: 803). Readers of this text, then, like its characters, are told and not told about the nature of this speculative reality. In addition to such distinctive experiences of the fictional world, this gradual revelation can be seen to contribute to a range of responses to its narrator. The invitation to share in the characters’ experiences is said to invite an empathetic understanding of the social control and mental habits that underpin Kathy’s passivity (Robbins 2007; Currie 2009). More broadly, the deferred recognition of these characters as clones is said to invite empathy by allowing readers to witness and identify with their relatable childhood experiences, relationships and personalities (Seaman 2007; Pandey 2011; Whitehead 2011; Shaddox 2013; Bizzini 2013). For such critics, this opportunity for identification is an attempt to ‘win readers over’ (Shaddox 2013: 462), or an invitation to view these characters as human, contrary to the judgement of their social context in the novel. Alongside its invitation for empathy and identification, however, critics have observed a range of ways in which this text acts to distance readers from Kathy. Similar to discussions of The Handmaid’s Tale (Section 4.4), critics note various possible interpretations of this narrator: as a victim or accomplice in the systematic brainwashing of the clones (Toker and Chertoff 2008:  167; Mullan 2009:  108; Whitehead 2011: 75; Bizzini 2013: 77). In addition, others describe identification with the uncloned members of society who benefit from this system (Robbins 2007: 293; Whitehead 2011: 58). Finally, critics comment on the extent to which Kathy is believable as a character. For some, Kathy’s failure to rebel and ‘haunting fatalism’ in response to her fate is ‘an offence against realism’ (Jerng 2008:  382; Mullan 2009:  104–5). Also frequently observed is a subtle deviation in the voice of Ishiguro’s narrator, whose experiences are ‘almost’ recognizable (Mullan 2009: 125), and ‘eeri[ly]’ familiar, ‘like a stripped-down, haiku vision of children everywhere’ (Kerr 2005: 1). Critics highlight the banality of Kathy’s prose, her repetitive use of common constructions, and the overand under-specificity of her description at various points in the narrative (Menand 2005; Wood 2005; Clark 2006; Black 2009; Mullan 2009; Pandey 2011). While some view this ‘dear-diary prose’ (Kermode 2005) as an invitation to identify with Kathy as ‘excruciatingly ordinary’ (Wood 2005) and ‘hideously familiar’ in her teenaged obsessions (Atwood 2011: 170), others report a disruption to the richness or realism of this character, describing her as ‘personality challenged’ (Kerr 2005: 2), ‘a speaking clock’ (Taylor 2005), or representative of the characters more broadly as ‘simulacra’ (Black 2009: 801). For Menand (2005), the characters ‘have the same mad, compulsive, quasi-mechanical qualities that Beckett’s do. There is something animatronic about them. They are simulators of humanness, figures engineered to pass as “real” ’. The overall reading experience, described as an ‘uneasy, mobile sense of identification’, or empathic unsettlement (Whitehead 2011: 58), is seen as complicating

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readers’ overall judgements of these characters’ humanity:  ‘In depicting the clones, Ishiguro performs a delicate balancing act that affords no easy resolution of their status’ (2011: 64). Crucially, it is through  the distinctive, gradual way in which we are invited to understand these characters, and its ‘control of distance’ (Currie 2009:  103), that Ishiguro can be seen to achieve this ‘balancing act’ and the ethical questions it raises. The extent to which the clones are identifiably human, ‘ “like” or “unlike” us’ (Whitehead 2011: 64), is therefore of central importance in critical discussions of the novel. The concept of mind style seems potentially relevant here as a means of analysing the contribution of Kathy’s language to readers’ impressions of her psychological conditioning and her distinctive (if perhaps lacking) characterization. In the following section I compare these responses once again to a sample of online reviews.

Reader responses to the novel on Goodreads With the objective of investigating this reading experience further, I collected a sample of the hundred most recent reviews of Never Let Me Go on Goodreads (2015d) using the methodology outlined in Section 1.3 and Section 4.4 (this dataset is referenced throughout as GR-2). Qualitative analysis again revealed a number of recurring themes. In the following section, the themes most relevant to my discussion of mind style and the types of responses contributing to their identification will be examined in closer detail. Again, readers’ responses to this novel reveal shared concerns with those observed in literary criticism. Notably, discussions of the novel’s gradual revelation of reality, including references to the experience of having been ‘told and not told’ about the future that awaits these characters are also repeatedly found in my sample of Goodreads reviews. In the following typical responses, readers comment on the impact of this experience: When Kathy is retelling the events of her childhood and at Hailsham, you know there’s something weird going on but you just don’t know what. That Hailsham isn’t just an ordinary school and there’s something totally fishy going on. BUT YOU JUST DON’T KNOW WHAT AND IT’S KILLING YOU. (R11, GR-2) There’s an immediate sense of unease, somehow highlighted by the conversational tone, as if the narrator has made you a confidant, and the story builds and builds from there. At one point, a character tells the group of children at Hailsham that they’ve ‘been told and not told’, and throughout the first few chapters of the book, I felt the exact same way. That at some level, I was taking in the hints and nuggets of information, so that by the time I got the full picture, I wasn’t at all surprised, but felt better off for not having received it all at once. (R18, GR-2)

Furthermore, as in the literary critical responses reviewed earlier, this authorial technique, and the slow pace/plot development often associated with it in the reviews, are viewed by some as feeding into the ethical questions raised by the novel, or the

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recurring theme I have categorized as questions of ethics and humanness. Exemplifying these interrelated themes in the reviews, one reader states: The story was so simple, but as you understood who they were, it drew into questions of ethics and humanity. It’s complexity didn’t lie in the plot, but in what was left unsaid. (R27, GR-2)

The results of this questioning, or the ‘balancing act’ identified by Whitehead (2011: 65), can be seen in the varied engagement with the characters described in the reviews collected. Many of these reviewers describe these characters as ‘real’ and relatable: What most stands out to me about this book are the characters. Their story, their relationships, the little fights (and the big ones) and the reconciliation that brought them to where they are today. These aren’t the larger-than-life characters you’d find in so many other books, but they feel so incredibly real. (R56, GR-2) [I] think this was a well crafted novel, in terms of character development. This book definitely made me think about things, and I  think it has some elements anyone can relate to, in terms of its descriptions of relationships, feelings, and personalities. (R84, GR-2)

Other readers in this sample of reviews, however, describe a difficulty in identifying with these characters and its consequences for their judgement of their humanity. Interestingly, developing the accounts observed in literary criticism, such readers often comment on the passivity with which the characters accept their fate as part of a broader lack of emotion, describing Kathy in particular as ‘detached’ (R90, GR-2; R34, GR-2) and ‘unemotional’ (R89, GR-2; R28, GR-2). The reviews below describe these impressions in more detail: It seemed to me like it was like those love stories that when a couple has been together for over 30  years, they stay with each other because it’s a habit rather than desire and when sex was mentioned, it was just for to say that they did it, that they were a ‘full-time’ couple. There was no feeling about Ruth’s death. It was like something it just happened and that’s all. And for me, the most disappointing part was when they went to Ms. Emily and after all that they found out, it just passed as if it was a non important thing. There were just Tommy’s screams and that’s all. All forgotten! (R45, GR-2) They’re extremely passive the whole way through. When they’re children in Hailsham they behave like normal children, but as soon as they become adolescents they lose their human quality. They don’t have particularly human interactions. They all feel very flat and one dimensional. None of them is into cooking, or hiking, or football, or crochet. The ‘veterans’ watch TV. Everyone has meaningless sex. Most people read, but even then there’s no passion to their reading. Do these people have a favorite subject? Unlikely. (R86, GR-2)

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In her cognitive stylistic discussion of reading group responses to this novel, Whiteley (2010, 2014) accounts for similarly varied responses to the characters in terms of linguistic features within the novel that work to both invite and disrupt identification. Applying a text world approach, Whiteley considers the accessibility and verisimilitude of Kathy’s knowledge and emotions in terms of their invitation for identification, and its inverse ‘disassociation’ in readers (2014: 401). Building on this earlier analysis and those of other critics, Sections 5.5 to 5.7 investigate the narrative using a cognitive grammatical approach. This analysis focuses specifically upon the distinctive manner in which knowledge is activated and developed in readers as a result of linguistic patterns, and their contribution to (a) experiences of the text world, or the sense of having been told and not told, and (b) readers’ developing relationships with this clone narrator and overall judgements of her humanity.

5.5 Puzzle solving in Never Let Me Go Extract (5a) is the opening to ‘Part One’ of the novel, which we learn from the subtitle is set in ‘England, late 1990s’: 5a. My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, but actually they want me to go on for another eight months, until the end of this year. That’ll make it almost exactly twelve years. Now I know my being a carer so long isn’t necessarily because they think I’m fantastic at what I do. There are some really good carers who’ve been told to stop after just two or three years. And I can think of one carer at least who went on for all of fourteen years despite being a complete waste of space. So I’m not trying to boast. But then I do know for a fact they’ve been pleased with my work, and by and large, I have too. My donors have always tended to do much better than expected. Their recovery times have been impressive, and hardly any of them have been classified as ‘agitated’, even before fourth donation. (p. 3) In this opening paragraph, readers are introduced to the fictional world through references to a range of entities. Analysing this opening in terms of mind style, we might argue that there are indicators already in this short passage of a possible overlexicalization of references to her profession as ‘carer’ (repeated four times) and also to specific quantities of time (‘thirty-one years old’, ‘eleven years’, ‘eight months’, ‘this year’, ‘almost exactly twelve years’, ‘two or three years’, ‘fourteen years’, ‘recovery times’). Already, in this opening, we can begin to form an impression of this character’s concern with (and possible fixation upon) her occupation and the passing of time, based on her lexical choices. Updating this discussion in terms of schema theory, Whiteley’s (2014: 398) text world analysis of this extract describes our initial encounter with the word ‘carer’ as cuing a specific schema in (British) readers, relating to this professional/ personal relationship, which then fails to match up fully with incoming information such as ‘donor’, ‘recovery times’ and ‘fourth donation’. Whiteley (2014) suggests that readers

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recognize these words as neosemes, or words which have taken on a new meaning in this speculative reality as ‘points of differentiation’ from our own (Stockwell 2000: 155), and as a disruption to the principle of minimal departure (Ryan 1991). From a cognitive stylistic perspective, what readers are faced with in this opening is a kind of puzzle: the impression of knowledge in this narrator which we lack, and which we must construct in order to comprehend the text. Returning to the typology of reader–character relationships described in Section 5.3, the novel presents a fictional mind that possesses schemata lacked by the reader (type C), and a resulting disruption to comprehension. This technique of ‘oblique reference’, and the puzzle solving it invites of the reader, is said to be common in speculative fiction (Spencer 1983: 40–41), where the creation of an imaginary culture requires readers to construct the ‘absent paradigms’ (Argenot 1979) of an alternative semantic system. In such accounts, this invitation is said to add to the ‘richness and roundness’ of readers’ conception of this reality and its immersive experience (Spencer 1983: 45). Interestingly, however, Whiteley’s (2014) reading group participants experienced this narrative opening as alienating and uncomfortable, reflecting what she models as a problematic projection into a narratee role assumed to share this knowledge, or difficulty with the ‘imaginative enactment’ of the relevant schemata invited by the text (Lahey 2005). Though alienated from this worldview, most readers, Whiteley (2014) observes, wish to continue reading, and do so. This kind of uncomfortable engagement – comparable with the self-conscious immersion in the text world of The Handmaid’s Tale described in Section 4.7 – is one that current text world approaches ‘do not seem well equipped to explain’ (Whiteley 2010: 142). Whiteley’s suggested solution, drawing on the work of Phelan (1996, 2005, 2007), is a reader projection into an alternative position, which observes rather than participating in the discourse (Whiteley 2014:  404). However, Whiteley does not explain how readers are then able to construct a coherent text world, and the absent knowledge it requires, from this alternative position. Applying CG, we can explain this process in terms of the tracing of a reference point chain between the linguistic cues in the text. The foregrounding repetition of ‘carer’ lends it a degree of prominence through parallelism, which following Langacker will make it a likely point of access to knowledge within the minds of readers. In British English, a ‘carer’ (n.) is a term used to refer to ‘a person whose occupation is the care of the sick, elderly or disabled’ (OED 2017). At least for British readers, the concept profiled by ‘donor’, which does not fit exactly with any of these three categories, is likely to be a fairly unprototypical target for ‘carer’, or one which is weakly/peripherally connected within its dominion. Providing a degree of linguistic support for this claim, in a search of the 100-million-word British National Corpus (BYU-BNC), ‘donor’ does not appear in the hundred most frequent collocations of the word ‘carer’ within a span of nine words (Davies 2004). However, these two concepts (along with those profiled by ‘recovery times’, ‘donation’, ‘work’, etc.) can be seen to share a broad domain of medicine, a claim which is again supported by examination of their collocations in the BNC.2 It is by tracing such loose semantic associations between these forms that a vague sense of coherence can develop here, or a fuzzy text world, despite its failure to match up with any specific real-life experience (or ‘schema’).

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As we go on reading, we enrich our conceptualization of this text world by seeking out further potential targets in this reference point chain. In the following pages, repeated uses of ‘carer’, ‘donor’ and ‘donation’ (twenty-two times altogether on pages 3–5) can be seen to maintain their focused targets in reader attention through what Stockwell (2009:  182) terms ‘renewing invocation’. The knowledge focused by each successive usage of these terms will differ slightly according to its new co-text and context within the constantly evolving current discourse space (Section 3.6). It is through the constant updating of the dominion for these reference points through their shifting context that readers may develop a richer understanding of these terms, and the text world to which they contribute. For example, loose connections may be made between Kathy’s ‘bedsit’, her ‘car’, the ‘recovery centre in Dover’ and her friends ‘Ruth’ and ‘Tommy’, in building up a richer sense of her life as a ‘carer’ (Ishiguro 2010: 3–4). By tracing a new, unprototypical path in this way, or ‘discourse-based’ as opposed to ‘frame-based connections’ along a reference point chain (Werth 1999:  164), readers gradually construct this knowledge for themselves. In schema theory terms, this might be compared to the kind of schema refreshment described as ‘connecting normally separate schemata in unusual ways’ in Semino’s (1997:  251) extended definition (Section 2.6). Our tracing of this reference point chain, however, is not straightforward. The reference point chain for this text world, which I shall label the ‘carer-donor chain’, is soon intertwined with a further ‘Halisham chain’ triggered by repeated references to this school, and Kathy’s remembered childhood there: 5b. It had to do with this particular donor I had once, in my third year as a carer; it was his reaction when I mentioned I was from Hailsham. He’d just come through his third donation, it hadn’t gone well, and he must have known he wasn’t going to make it. He could hardly breathe, but he looked towards me and said: ‘Hailsham. I bet that was a beautiful place.’ Then the next morning, when I was making conversation to keep his mind off it all, and I asked where he’d grown up, he mentioned some place in Dorset and his face beneath the blotches went into a completely new kind of grimace. And I realised then how desperately he didn’t want to be reminded. Instead, he wanted to hear about Hailsham. So over the next five or six days, I told him whatever he wanted to know, and he’d lie there, all hooked up, a gentle smile breaking through. He’d ask me about the big things and the little things. About our guardians, about how we each had our own collection chests under our beds, the football, the rounders, the little path that took you all round the outside of the main house, round all its nooks and crannies, the duck pond, the food, the view from the Art Room over the fields on a foggy morning. Sometimes he’d make me say things over and over; things I’d told him only the day before, he’d ask about like I’d never told him. ‘Did you have a sports pavilion?’ ‘Which guardian was your special favourite?’ At first I thought this was just the drugs, but then I realised his mind was clear enough. What he wanted was not just to hear about Hailsham, but to remember Hailsham, just like it had been his own childhood. (p. 5, original emphasis)

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In comparison to the carer-donor chain, the Hailsham chain is closely knit, consisting of cohesive references to an idealized English school life in close succession: ‘football’, ‘rounders’, ‘little path’, ‘duck pond’, ‘food’, ‘Art Room’, ‘fields’, ‘foggy morning’, ‘sports pavilion’, the dominion connections between which are likely to be stronger, or more deeply entrenched, in the minds of (British) readers  – if not through lived experience, then through representations in books and film.3 The experiential effect of this reference point chain, I would suggest, is a dense dominion of associations and a richly fleshed out world switch for this past situation (Gavins 2007). As the novel continues, this reference point chain continues to develop in this manner, as Kathy’s detailed and repetitive account returns to, and strengthens, these connections. Parallel to the donor-character seen in this extract, Kathy’s narrative can be seen to invite a rich conceptualization of a childhood that, for readers with knowledge of this cultural background, may feel familiar  – a process describable, in schema theory terms, as schema reinforcement (Cook 1994; Semino 1997; Section 2.6). So far in this analysis, we have identified two reference point chains in this text, which contribute to our incremental, text-driven understanding of the text worlds it presents. In one sense, this analysis can be seen as a CG specification of the sequence of schema ‘headers’ (Schank and Abelson 1977) or ‘world builders’ (Whiteley 2014) encountered in a text. What is particularly interesting about this text is the way in which these two textual chains interact during the course of the novel. In extract (5b) the tightly knit ‘Hailsham chain’ can be seen to distract readers, like the donor-narratee described, from the carer-donor situation in the text world, and the puzzle we have yet to solve in its conceptualization. In the following section, I describe the recurring distraction, and wider ‘burying’ of knowledge, which characterize Kathy’s narration across the novel as part of a distinctive mind style.

5.6 Burying and mind style An important reason for selecting extract (5b) to analyse, alongside the opening, is that it contains the first (fleeting) reference to the wider reality of cloning and the ‘deplorable’ treatment of clone children which Kathy and Tommy learn about towards the end of the novel (Ishiguro 2010: 255). This clue appears in the reference to ‘some place in Dorset’ and the unnamed donor’s strong reaction to it. Analysing this extract in terms of Emmott and Alexander’s (2014) discussion of burying (Section 5.3), this piece of information can be described as buried, in that it cannot be fully comprehended on a first reading, and may be missed altogether. Analysing this instance more closely, the mention of ‘some place in Dorset’ exemplifies various burying strategies: i. Mention the item as little as possible, since this is one of a dozen or so fleeting references to these clone farms throughout the novel; iii. Underspecify the item, through the generality of ‘some place’; and vii. Place the item in positions where the reader is distracted or not yet interested, through its presentation just before the introduction of the new (and therefore prominent) Hailsham chain. Finally, this reference demonstrates vi. Separate/distribute references to the item. Following Stockwell (2009: 182), we might view the temporary intrusion of the Hailsham chain

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as ‘occluding’ the earlier carer-donor chain, and causing its potential targets to fade from focused attention in a ‘gradual revocation’. The intervals between the references we receive to these other institutions across the text, and the resulting fading of their targets from attention, disrupts the tracing of connections between them as part of a developing understanding. Through this discourse structure, readers’ developing conceptualization of the text world, and understanding of the adult future that awaits these children, is repeatedly disrupted. These strategies can be identified throughout Kathy’s construal across the novel. First, the carer-donor reference chain is cut off repeatedly throughout the text, distributing references to this present-day text world. Brief shifts to Kathy’s current work as a carer are seen periodically, as in extract (5c), before returning to detailed descriptions of childhood events and the closely knit Hailsham chain to which they contribute: 5c. I won’t be a carer any more come the end of the year, and though I’ve got a lot out of it, I have to admit I’ll welcome the chance to stop and rest – to stop and think and remember. (p. 37) Looking at some of the memories Kathy recounts, further clues as to this adult future  – or reference points in the carer-donor chain  – can be seen buried within them. In extracts (5d) to (5f) the items in bold represent potential reference points for readers’ developing understanding: 5d. ‘What she was talking about was, you know, about us. What’s going to happen to us one day. Donations and all that.’ ‘But we have been taught about all that,’ I said. ‘I wonder what she meant. Does she think there are things we haven’t been told yet?’ Tommy thought for a moment, then shook his head. ‘I don’t think she meant it like that.’ (p. 29) 5e. When I was discussing it with Ruth a few years ago at the centre in Dover, she claimed Miss Lucy had told us a lot more; that she’d explained how before donations we’d all spend some time first as carers, about the usual sequence of donations, the recovery centres and so on – but I’m pretty sure she didn’t. (p. 80) 5f. When I told Tommy about what happened with Madame in the dorm, he came up with a fairly simple explanation. By then, of course, we all knew something I hadn’t known back then, which was that none of us could have babies. It’s just possible I’d somehow picked up the idea when I was younger without fully registering it. (p. 72) In each of these examples, these references are embedded within a complex configuration of mental spaces. In extract (5d), a reference to ‘Donations and all that’ is presented in the direct speech of Tommy during a remembered conversation twenty years ago. Adding another layer of complexity, Tommy is himself recalling this information from the remembered speech of another character, Miss Lucy, a few weeks before. Similarly,

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in extract (5e) details of the caring and donation system are presented in the indirect speech of Ruth during a remembered conversation ‘a few years ago’, again describing her memories of the remembered speech of Miss Lucy on another occasion. Finally, in extract (5f), the fact that the students are infertile is embedded in the remembered knowledge of a younger Kathy during a conversation with Tommy some years earlier. Applying text world theory, these extracts represent a series of embedded world switches and modal worlds. Significantly, the epistemic modal worlds constructed for the memories of characters are not directly accessible to the reader – they are ‘enactoraccessible’ in that we cannot verify their truth value for ourselves (Gavins 2007: 77). In text world terms, the information presented in this form exists at a ‘conceptual distance’ from the reader in the discourse world (Gavins 2007:  109; Section 3.8). Applying the CG construal configuration developed in Section 3.8, and represented in Figure 3.9, this experiential sense of distance can be understood as a distribution of attention between multiple conceptualizers, leading to an increased subjectivity, or reduced prominence, in this information’s construal. This conceptual distancing, and the reduced prominence it represents, is furthered by the extensive use of epistemic modality, which invites readers to question the reliability of such memories throughout the narrative. In extract (5d) Tommy himself modalizes his interpretation: ‘I don’t think she meant it like that’, while in extract (5e), the narrator-enactor of Kathy directly contradicts Ruth’s memory: ‘claimed’, ‘I’m pretty sure she didn’t’. More broadly, this narrator-enactor of Kathy repeatedly expresses doubt at her own memories throughout the text: ‘maybe I’m remembering it wrong’ (p. 8) and ‘This was all a long time ago now so I might have some of it wrong’ (p. 13). Returning to Emmott and Alexander’s strategies, this embedding of information in modalized worlds acts to xi. Discredit the characters reporting the item so that the item is less salient. In addition, this information is often presented as unimportant to the characters themselves, for example, the dismissive ‘Donations and all that’ (5d). Shortly after extract (5f), Kathy informs her narratee that ‘None of us, incidentally, was particularly bothered about it’ (p. 72). Such remembered conversations thus reflect the related strategies of x. Have the characters say that the item is uninteresting and v. Make the item appear unimportant in the narrative world. It is through these three discourse-level burying strategies, and their reduction of the type of prominence which Emmott and Alexander (2014:  331) term ‘narrativeworld salience’, that some of the most direct insights into this speculative reality are presented. Suggestions of the horrific detail of the cloning system are often seen in the form of superstitions, jokes and theories among the characters. The children’s ghost stories about a boy who ran away from Hailsham to be found in ‘the woods’ with his hands and feet cut off (p. 49) and the jokes they later make as teenagers about ‘unzipping’ their body parts (p. 86) hint at the gruesome fate awaiting them. Later, as they approach adulthood, the characters develop theories as to their origins, speculating about the people (or ‘possibles’) on whom they were modelled (p.  137). Through their presentation as fantasies and superstitions in epistemic modal worlds, and their treatment as a source of humour by other characters, such ideas are discredited and their apparent interest and importance in the narrative world reduced. Significantly, however, such insights are not entirely discredited. The fulfilment of the characters’

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superstition about Norfolk as the ‘lost corner’ (or geographical lost property box) of England (p. 65) invites readers to reconsider these earlier theories and the buried truth they might contain. By maintaining a careful balance of fantasy and reality in the characters’ beliefs, Ishiguro allows their final theory, that of ‘deferrals’ from donations, to contain an element of hope prior to the novel’s hope-shattering conclusion. A further characteristic feature of Kathy’s discourse concerns the sequencing of her account. Extracts (5e) and (5f) reflect Kathy’s tendency to combine memories of past situations with evaluations of these memories at later points in time, for example, her conversations with Ruth and Tommy. Such effects can be identified also in Kathy’s broader tendency to break from a chronological sequence of events by introducing entities without explanation, to be returned to in a subsequent chapter: 5g. I can see why the Exchanges became so important to us. For a start, they were our only means, aside from the Sales – the Sales were something else, which I’ll come on to later – of building up a collection of personal possessions. (p. 16) 5h. What I’ve got today isn’t the actual cassette, the one I had back then at Hailsham, the one I lost. It’s the one Tommy and I found in Norfolk years afterwards – but that’s another story I’ll come to later. (p. 64) Emmott and Alexander (2014:  331) emphasize the importance of ‘text position’ for burying, and suggest that ‘information might not be so readily used in puzzle solving if it is presented too early’  – or prior to the presentation of the puzzle itself. These examples therefore reflect the burying strategy vii. Place item in a position where reader is distracted or not yet interested. In CG terms, we might say that until the relevant reference point has been profiled, such information, and its connection, will not be facilitated as a target. On the other hand, such half-explained items and the narrative gaps they represent (Hardy 2005) fleetingly distract our attention from the current reference point chain being traced. The result of this discourse structure is a distinctive reading experience involving an ongoing reconsideration of previously encountered information, or what Toker and Chertoff (2008: 169) term ‘progressively informed suspense’. In CG terms, such sequencing can be seen to depart from natural paths of mental access:  of temporal and causal sequencing, and from ‘given’ information to ‘new’. Specifically, In CG, such discourse-level deviation results in the need for extra processing effort in the form of backtracking, or rescanning along this path in its correct order, and a repair of the conceptualization arrived at (Langacker 2008: 490). Backtracking along reference point chains has particular relevance for the context of literary reading, where readers are often said to ‘refamiliarize’ (Mill and Kuiken 1994), ‘reconceptualize’ (Emmott 2003; Bray 2007), or ‘reconstrue’ language (Harrison and Nuttall forthcoming) in order to understand it fully. In Never Let Me Go, I  would argue, our reconstrual of such past events into a coherent understanding is made difficult by the text. By allowing the knowledge and evaluations of an older Kathy (and Tommy/Ruth) to seep into descriptions of earlier situations, as seen in extracts (5e) and (5f), this temporal structure disrupts readers’ sense of Kathy’s knowledge at various points in her childhood, blurring the

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‘anticipation’ and ‘recollection’ of her different character-enactors (Currie 2009: 103), and her development from ‘innocence to experience’ (Jerng 2008: 383). In this way, like The Handmaid’s Tale, this narrative can be seen to disrupt our discourse-level imposition of structure to form a structured configuration of world switches and modal worlds, or a ‘coherent and meaningful whole’ (Gavins 2007: 6). Burying is therefore a recurring feature of the construal of this fictional world. Through a range of strategies, Ishiguro disrupts the participation of profiled entities in the carer-donor reference point chain responsible for the conceptualization of the text world. By distracting readers with the highly cohesive Hailsham chain of the childhood world switch, reducing the prominence of significant information, and distributing and disordering textual cues, Ishiguro reduces the likelihood with which readers will develop a rich dominion of targets for such cues as reference points, or form connections between them as part of a coherent understanding. Despite such burying, however, readers report a partial awareness of such information in the background, or a sense of having been ‘told and not told’ about this reality (Section 5.4). Drawing on the work by Sanford and Emmott (2012:  86) discussed earlier, some initial suggestions might be made with regard to our processing of this buried information. Broadly speaking, the burying (or backgrounding) of information might be hypothesized to have the opposite psychological effects to those suggested for foregrounding:  that is, reduced mental access, reduced strength of mental representation, reduced depth of processing, and reduced likelihood of a mental simulation. Developing the latter two of these effects, Sanford and Emmott (2012: 103–31) suggest the relevance of shallow processing (Barton and Sanford 1993) to narrative, or the observation that ‘word meanings are not always fully retrieved, or integrated into the developing representation of the discourse’ (Sanford and Emmott 2012:  109). A  related consideration is the extent to which the conceptualization achieved in this way will feature a mental simulation (Sanford and Emmott 2012: 132– 60). In cognitive linguistic research, shallow processing involving ‘superficial’ strategies such as word association is said to enable understanding without the involvement of a mental simulation (Niedenthal et  al. 2005:  199). Drawing on such accounts, the reader experience of ‘knowing and not knowing’ in Never Let Me Go could relate to the shallow processing of these textual cues and the lack of a mental simulation for the text world they construct. Though concentrating on the burying of ‘plot-significant information’ in detective fiction, Emmott and Alexander (2014:  343) suggest its significance to other forms of writing. Ishiguro’s novel is an interesting case study in this respect. Ishiguro has reportedly stated that Never Let Me Go is ‘not a mystery story’: ‘If information does trickle gradually it’s because the children themselves do not realize who they are. The reader is on a sort of parallel journey but it’s not a mystery story. My focus is elsewhere’ (cited in Wroe 2006). The specific effects of burying in this novel would seem to provide a basis for this distinction. While in detective fiction, or mystery stories, clues are ‘placed in the background of a text with the intention that they should not be easily found’ (Emmott and Alexander 2014: 331), in Ishiguro’s novel readers are invited to retain a degree of awareness of such clues. This finding suggests that burying, and the focusing of knowledge which it manipulates, might best be conceived

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in terms of a scalar model of foreground and background, in line with the CG account of prominence (Section 3.4). Viewed in this way, degrees of burying may contribute not only to the creation of twists in a plot, but to a range of textural and text-specific effects. Significantly, in this text, these burying techniques are notably similar to those used by the ‘guardians’ of Hailsham themselves. The children’s reported inability to follow the lectures of Miss Emily: ‘try as we might, we couldn’t really follow these lectures. It was partly her language’ (Ishiguro 2010:43) seems to parallel the reader’s experience of the unfamiliar neosemes at the opening of the novel. Meanwhile, Kathy’s theory of the guardians’ tendency to combine sex education with talk of donations closely resembles the strategy of distraction discussed previously: 5i. One thing occurs to me now is that when the guardians first started giving us proper lectures about sex, they tended to run them together with talk about the donations. At that age – again, I’m talking of around thirteen – we were all pretty worried and excited about sex, and naturally would have pushed the other stuff into the background. (p. 81) Similarly, Tommy’s theory of this psychological conditioning reflects the sequencing of information and its effects: 5j. Tommy thought it possible the guardians had, throughout all our years at Hailsham, timed very carefully and deliberately everything they told us, so that we were always just too young to understand properly the latest piece of information. But of course we’d take it in at some level, so that before long all this stuff was there in our heads without us ever having examined it properly. (p. 81) Through such parallels, readers are invited to associate their experience of the narrative with the psychological conditioning of Kathy as part of her mind style. Importantly, the detailed description of this narrator’s present circumstances (as seen in extracts [5a] and [5c]), regularly reminds readers that this construal originates in the adult enactor of Kathy, not the schoolgirl. The presence of these burying strategies in adult Kathy’s narrative suggests their ongoing impact as a persistent cognitive habit, and one which might be held accountable for her strangely passive acceptance of her fate at the novel’s conclusion. As suggested by the reader responses reviewed in Section 5.4, this mind style can be seen to invite readers to understand the psychological conditioning that is responsible for Kathy’s passivity as part of an empathetic relationship. As was argued in the previous chapter, by inviting readers to enact this cognitive habit as part of their own conceptualization of the text world, the text can be seen to implicate readers in this mind style. Here, this enactment invites identification with Kathy, or the recognition that ‘our own approach to death, suffering, and constraint may not be entirely different’ (Black 2009: 792). ‘Like her’, Robbins (2007: 293) states, ‘I depend for my daily dose of contentment on a blinkering of awareness that I myself in my better moments would find outrageous and repulsive’.

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However, as in The Handmaid’s Tale, readers once again attribute this mind style in various ways (see Section 5.4). The empathetic enactment of Kathy’s psychological conditioning can also be attributed to her skills as a ‘carer’, or the means through which she actively perpetuates the cloning system by reconciling other clones to a similar state of complicity: ‘hardly any of them have been classified as “agitated”, even before fourth donation’ (5a). In such readings, this mind style is interpreted not as a reflection of this narrator’s cognitive habits, but as a deliberate rhetorical strategy (McIntyre 2005; Section 2.4) designed to offer her narratee the same kind of temporary distraction, or ‘sheltering’ from the cruelties of this reality, as that provided to the donor-character in extract (5b). As in The Handmaid’s Tale, invitations to attend to the ground of this narration are seen in the uses of epistemic modality and self-conscious structuring of the discourse identified earlier, along with repeated discourse markers such as ‘as I say’ (e.g. Ishiguro 2010: 21, 90, 104), and ‘Mind you’ (e.g. p. 119, 280). Once again, such grounding can be seen to invite an alternative attribution of this mind style by drawing attention to the narrator-conceptualizer at this intervening narrative level, and the interpersonal relationship with the narratee constructed through her construal. Finally, this construal can also be interpreted as reflecting the cognitive (and linguistic) habits of the uncloned members of society who choose to ignore (and discursively bury) the suffering of the clones: ‘They didn’t want to think about you students, or the conditions you were brought up in. In other words, my dears, they wanted you back in the shadows’ (p. 259). Attributed in this way, to the ideological point of view (Section 2.4) of such ‘normal’ people, or ‘the ways in which language can normalize atrocities deemed necessary in a given ideology’ (McDonald 2007:  78), readers’ own sheltered experience of this fictional reality, and restricted fleshing out of their text world, is one which implicates them in the ethical failure of this society as a whole. As was seen in The Handmaid’s Tale, therefore, alternative attributions of this construal are simultaneously cued within the text. For readers of this novel, awareness of these multiple invited attributions, reflected in the literary critical responses reviewed in Section 5.4, can be seen to complicate their emotional and ethical experiences of this narrator, inviting them to ‘wonder which side Ishiguro is on’ (Robbins 2007: 293) and ‘where the reader fits into this’ (McDonald 2007: 80). In my reading of the novel, my awareness of these possible attributions of this construal: to the minds of the donors, carers and organ recipients that variably participate in this system, led to a broad sense of implication in this speculative society as part of my experience of the text. In both The Handmaid’s Tale and Never Let Me Go, the reader interpretation of the mind style identified has been seen to feature the potential for attribution(s) to multiple conceptualizers across different levels of their discourse structure. Together, these analyses suggest the potential complexities involved in the attribution of a mind style to the characters presented within first-person narratives more broadly. Notably, while previous discussions of mind style recognize the distinction between the ‘levels of interpersonal interaction’ (Fanlo Piniés 2005:  103) and questions of ‘reliability’ (Semino 2007: 170) involved in first-person narrative point of view, they analyse the language of such narratives as a basis for inferences into the character’s cognitive habits, and do not mention inferences with regard to the retrospective narrator. The analyses here suggest that readers’ experiences of such mind styles may be more complicated,

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and call for further investigation into the ways in which the different levels interact during interpretation. In Chapter 6 the experience of a mind style through a different kind of point of view, in a third-person narrative, will be investigated using this CG framework.

5.7 Specificity and humanness So far, I have argued that the lexical choices seen in Never Let Me Go, and their focusing and burying of knowledge across the text, invite readers to enact its clone narrator’s developing understanding for themselves. As in responses to The Handmaid’s Tale, reader responses to this text suggest that this mind style has a range of consequences for readers’ emotional and ethical responses to the characters. As was described in Section 5.4, critics of the novel comment upon the believability of the characters:  the ‘almost’ familiarity (Mullan 2009) of Kathy’s experiences, and the not-quite-rightness of the characters more broadly, as ‘simulators of humanness’ (Menand 2005; Black 2009). This sense of the uncanny (Freud 2003), or ‘ourselves, through a glass darkly’ (Atwood 2011: 173) is described within the narrative itself: 5k. We could see hills in the distance that reminded us of the ones in the distance at Hailsham, but they seemed to us oddly crooked, like when you draw a picture of a friend and it’s almost right but not quite, and the face on the sheet gives you the creeps. (p. 116) This subtle experience, shared in my own reading of this narrator, is one which might again be accounted for using concepts from CG. Drawing on literary critical interpretations of the novel, a linguistic pattern that might contribute to this effect is the specificity of Kathy’s construal of her experiences (Section 3.4). Kathy’s description is said to be characterized by a ‘stilted precision’ (Black 2009: 801), ‘strangely exact yet oblique prose’ (Moore 2005) and an ‘attentive[ness] to minute details of the setting and of other people’s conduct, turning her life, and the reader’s passage through it, into a conscious semiotic experience’ (Toker and Chertoff 2008: 167). For Menand (2005), such over-specificity is typical of Ishiguro’s style more broadly: The emotional situation in his novels is spelled out in meticulous, sometimes comically tedious detail, and the focus is entirely on the narrator’s struggles to achieve clarity and contentment in an uncooperative world [. . .] This is why the prose is always slightly overspecific. It’s realism from an instruction manual: literal, thorough, determined to leave nothing out. But it has a vaguely irreal effect.

Returning to the novel, examples of this highly specific construal might be identified in Kathy’s descriptions of behaviour and body language throughout her narrative: 5l. He was just raving, flinging his limbs about, at the sky, at the wind, at the nearest fence post. Laura said he was maybe ‘rehearsing his Shakespeare’. Someone

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else pointed out how each time he screamed something he’d raise one foot off the ground, pointing it outwards, ‘like a dog doing a pee’. Actually, I’d noticed the same foot movement myself, but what had struck me was that each time he stamped the foot back down again, flecks of mud flew up around his shins. (p. 10) 5m. At the Cottages, though, when a couple were saying goodbye to each other, there’d be hardly any words, never mind embraces or kisses. Instead you slapped your partner’s arm near the elbow, lightly with the back of your knuckles, the way you might do to attract someone’s attention. Usually the girl did it to the boy, just as they were moving apart. [. . .] Tommy didn’t have a clue what was going on, and would turn abruptly to Ruth and go: ‘What?’, so that she’d have to glare furiously at him, like they were in a play and he’d forgotten his lines. (p. 119) In his CG account, Langacker (2008: 56) gives the following example of increasingly specific construals of a situation: Something happened. → A person perceived a rodent. → A girl saw a porcupine. → An alert little girl wearing glasses caught a brief glimpse of a ferocious porcupine with sharp quills.

More common, Langacker suggests, are those examples which exhibit a mixture of schematic and specific elements, such as:  Somebody saw a ferocious porcupine with sharp quills. In extracts (5l) and (5m), the process  – an action or gesture:  having a tantrum (5l), and saying goodbye (5m)  – is highly specific, while the participants within this process are relatively schematic, unspecified using the pronoun ‘he’ in (5l), and generalized further in (5m) through pronouns ‘they’, ‘you’, and references to a ‘girl’ or ‘boy’. Operating alongside focusing and burying within a construal, specificity concerns the amount of information provided by linguistic choices and the nature of the knowledge focused as a result (Jaakola et al. 2014: 646–7; Harrison 2017: 87). Significantly, our experiential knowledge of situations and actions can be seen to contain an expected level of detail. Sanford and Emmott (2012: 40–41) describe the departure from such expectations through the ‘over-specification’ of a scenario as one which may prompt a ‘ “double take” on ordinary events’ in readers. Similarly, Herman (2009a:  130–31) describes a ‘default expectation’ as to the specificity of a construal according to readers’ embodied experiences of the situation and the vantage point from which it is perceived. In both accounts, exceeding this prototypical level of specificity in narrative may provide a source of defamiliarization during reading and the impression of a focalized perspective. Here, comparisons can be drawn with research in social psychology. In action identification theory (Vallacher and Wegner 1987, 1989) people conceive and describe actions at a level of specificity which reflects their embodied experiences of them. According to this theory, people identify their own actions at the ‘highest level’ possible:  favouring a schematic description (emphasizing the action’s causes and

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implications) and adopting a ‘low-level’ or specific description (how it is done) only when problems arise. Furthermore, the self-conscious attention to mechanistic detail that comes with low-level identification, for example, pushing the pedals, turning the wheel, may impair performance of an everyday action normally identified at a higher level, for example, driving a car (Vallacher and Wegner 1987:  9). Building on this account, Kozak et  al. (2006) found that the ‘level’ at which participants described another person’s action correlated with the degree to which they attributed mental states such as thoughts and emotions to the person involved. In their experiments, the more specific an action description, the lesser the mind attribution seen for its agent. In extracts (5l) and (5m) it is a departure from an embodied prototype of specificity through the over-specific construal of behaviour that arguably gives  rise to the defamiliarization described by critics as a ‘conscious semiotic experience’ (Toker and Chertoff 2008), or ‘vaguely irreal effect’ (Menand 2005). Such specificity can be seen to add to the sense of self-consciousness suggested for such actions through Kathy’s description of them as performed like ‘Shakespeare’ (5l), or ‘a play’ (5m). Furthermore, drawing on the findings of Kozak et al. (2006), this defamiliarizing construal, we might argue, invites readers to gain a sense of Kathy’s limited understanding of the thoughts and feelings of her (younger) self and others through mind attribution. While Kathy’s construal of actions and body language is over-specific, the mental states which underlie such behaviour are often under-specified. Mullan (2009:  110) notes her recurring use of the word ‘something’ in the situations she recalls. Continuing the use of corpus methods seen in this chapter, a keyword comparison of this novel with the BNC Imaginative Writing Sampler using Wmatrix (Rayson 2009) reveals ‘something’ to be significantly overused in this novel, along with other indefinite pronouns such as ‘sometimes’ and ‘anything’ and the general noun ‘things’. Statistically speaking, each of these keywords has a log likelihood value of over 15.13, which indicates significance at p hearer > human > animal > physical object > abstract entity

Though ‘less potent’ than perceived participant role, this assessment is said to be a significant motivating factor in our linguistic construal of situations. Langacker (1991: 307) exemplifies the effects of empathy upon clause structure through the wellformedness of the corresponding passive for (a), but not (b): a. The dog chased me. (a*) I was chased by the dog. b. I chased the dog. (b*)?? The dog was chased by me. While both the dog and speaker are the agent in their respective action chains in (a) and (b), ‘I’ seems to possess a quality that allows it to be given prominence as the subject or trajector in (a*), which ‘the dog’ in (b*) lacks. The ‘empathetic’ quality to which Langacker attributes this effect seems to be closely related to mind attribution, or the extent to which we view an entity as having thoughts and feelings like our own. However, according to Langacker: While empathy per se is a subjective notion, a participant’s location on the empathy hierarchy is for the most part objectively determinable: whether an entity is human, animate, physical, or abstract is a matter of intrinsic character, with little leeway for construal. (1991: 307)

This view is in my opinion a problematic one, which fails to take account of the subjectivity involved in assessments of ‘likeness’ and ‘common concerns’ (Langacker 1991:  307), and in our psychological assessments of others more broadly. As noted in Dowty’s (1991: 574) comments on the role of ‘sentience’ in assessments of clausal participants, the boundaries between entities along this scale are ‘clouded’ in real life. Such boundaries are further manipulated in literature, speculative fiction being a good example (Section 1.4). Though providing a useful concept for literary discussion in general terms (e.g. Stockwell 2009: 25), in order to be capable of dealing with the kinds of characters and situations found in literary texts, Langacker’s concept of the empathy hierarchy is in need of refinement.3 One means of developing this aspect of construal is to view an entity’s position along the empathy hierarchy as the result of mind attribution, as researched in social psychology (Section 2.5). Reconsidered in these terms, this assessment is not the simple recognition of an inherent quality, but the result of a cognitive operation, involving our Theory of Mind, which is understood to involve an application of folk psychological knowledge, a mental simulation of experience, or a combination of the two. Operating at both producer and receiver ends of a linguistic construal (Section 3.4), mind attribution may be seen to influence both the way in which a situation is prototypically described – as in the above example with the dog – but also the way in which this situation is then comprehended by readers. For the remainder of this

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section I  explain how this social psychological research might be incorporated and applied as part of a mind style analysis using CG. As was described in Section 2.5, cognitive approaches to narrative such as those of Palmer (2004, 2010), Herman (2007, 2013) and Zunshine (2006) have explored the ways in which our capacity for mind attribution is drawn upon, and manipulated, by fictional texts. Habits of social cognition in the form of ‘Theory of Mind’ have also received some attention in existing discussions of mind style. Bockting (1994, 1995) compares the ‘attributive style’ of the characters in William Faulkner’s novels (1994:  162), or the linguistic patterns through which they attribute thoughts and perceptions to other characters, drawing on their own Theory of Mind. More recently, Semino (2011, 2014) has investigated the problems with Theory of Mind suggested by the linguistic choices of fictional characters with autism spectrum disorder. Leading on from such work, a productive area of research for the study of mind style is that concerned with the factors affecting mind attribution and its consequences for our interpretation of the character minds involved. Research into ‘mind attribution’ (or ‘mind perception’) in social psychology provides a growing source of insights into such matters (Waytz, Gray et  al. 2010). This is distinct from, but compatible with, the insights gained through stylistic applications of attribution theory (e.g. Jones and Nisbett 1971), concerned with broader attributions of causality to behaviour (Gerrig and Albritton 1990; Pollard-Gott 1993; Culpeper 1996, 2001; van Peer and Pander Maat 2001; Palmer 2007b). In everyday life, categories of entities differ in terms of the amount and type of mind that we typically attribute to them. Human beings are usually perceived as having more complex mental lives than animals or machines (Gray et  al. 2007). However, experimental research in social psychology shows that our attribution of mind is variable and somewhat subjective. We have a tendency to anthropomorphize inanimate entities such as toys, cars and computers by giving them human-like mental states (Waytz, Morewedge et al. 2010) and often dehumanize, or fail to attribute such mental states to human beings (Haslam 2006). To some extent, then, ‘mind is in the eye of the perceiver’ (Waytz, Gray et al. 2010: 384). Moreover, mind attribution is not a question of ‘mind’ or ‘no-mind’, but a continuum with varying degrees of richness and complexity (Kozak et  al. 2006:  544). Studies have suggested that the subjective positioning of an entity along this continuum (often measured by ratings such as ‘feels pain’, ‘possesses beliefs’, ‘has intentions’ along a point scale) is influenced by a range of factors, many of which have direct relevance for our experiences of fictional characters. First, certain characteristics have been seen to influence the richness of the minds attributed to entities. Our psychological judgements are influenced by the perception of anthropomorphic features, that is, the extent to which the entity looks or acts like a human and, more specifically, our human prototype – ourselves (Morewedge et al. 2007:  1). Studies of ‘infrahumanization’ and ‘self-humanization’ have shown that people attribute more human-like mental states to members of their perceived ‘ingroup’ (in terms of race, nationality, etc.) than to members of an ‘out-group’ (Leyens et al. 2000), and to themselves than to others (Haslam et al. 2005). A particularly important anthropomorphic feature appears to be motion. Certain kinds of ‘self-propelled’ and ‘goal-directed’ motion seem to act as cues for the

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attribution of mental states (Premack 1990; Premack and Premack 1997; Luo and Baillargeon 2005). Developmental accounts of the animate–inanimate distinction often emphasize the importance of the start and end point of an entity’s movement: its onset/energy source and final object, state or location, as perceptual cues for this distinction (see Rakison and Poulin-Dubois 2001 for a review). In addition, entities moving along an irregular/nonlinear path, or in an unpredictable manner, are more likely to be perceived as animate than ones whose path is smooth/linear or predictable (Rakison and Poulin-Dubois 2001; Opher 2002). Also affecting mind attribution is the perception of an entity as an individual or as part of a group. The extent to which a group is perceived to be entitative (Campbell 1958), or ‘a single, coherent unit’ (Morewedge et al. 2013: 1196), has been found to affect the attribution of mental states to its members. Perception of targets as part of an entitative group leads to reduced attention to individual differences and an increased reliance on generalized knowledge or stereotypes as the basis of psychological judgements (Hamilton et al. 2004). As a result, members are more likely to be judged as homogenous in terms of mental states – in the sense of being of one mind – and are more likely to be judged negatively as untrustworthy and threatening (Abelson et al. 1998; Dasgupta et al. 1999). While increasing the attribution of a group mind in this way, perception as part of an entitative group also causes targets to be attributed less mind as individuals (Bloom and Veres 1999; Morewedge et al. 2013). The relationship between the two has been shown to reflect a ‘group-member mind trade off ’, whereby ‘the more a group is attributed a group mind, the less members of that group are attributed minds, and vice versa’ (Waytz and Young 2012: 78). By manipulating the entitativity of novel targets both visually and verbally in terms of gestalt properties, these effects have been seen to arise specifically from the perception of targets as opposed to an application of prior knowledge of group identity (Waytz and Young 2012; Morewedge et al. 2013). Finally, research into objectification has suggested that focusing upon the bodies of individuals influences attributions of mind (Nussbaum 1995). Increased attention to the bodies of male and female targets in images or verbal description has been shown to lead to a reduced attribution of certain mental states (particularly those related to intelligence and agency) as a form of dehumanization (Heflick and Goldenberg 2009; Loughnan et al. 2010; Gray, Knickman et al. 2011; Gray, Knobe et al. 2011). The characteristics of the mind doing the attributing also factor in this process. Interacting with such perceptual cues is our knowledge and expectations of the entity acquired through our past experiences of them (Fiske and Neuberg 1990; Culpeper 2001, 2002). Drawing on the metaphor used previously in this book, the relationship between these two kinds of input in social cognition might again be described as an interaction between ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ processing. Indeed, such an interaction, and the process of selective attention to which it relates (Desimone and Duncan 1995) may provide a useful, if simplified, means of understanding the relationship between simulation and theory in our understandings of other minds (Frith and Frith 2006: 41; Kerr 2008: 210). In this view, our folk psychological knowledge of other minds may be triggered by our perceptions of specific cues, and may in turn guide and influence our selective attention to such cues and the sensorimotor simulations that result. Drawing

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on the CG account set out in Chapter 5, mind attribution may thus be understood as a specific component of the wider focusing of embodied, encyclopaedic knowledge along a reference point chain during reading. Research in social psychology has also suggested that the motivations of the perceiver may affect their attention to the cues for mind attribution presented. First, effectance motivation, or our desire for ‘understanding, predictability and control’ may influence the amount of mind we attribute to others (Waytz, Gray et al. 2010: 384). It is by strengthening this motivation, that the unpredictable behaviour of a computer, for example, is said to invite anthropomorphism (Waytz, Morewedge et al. 2010). Mind attribution has been shown to satisfy this desire, giving rise to a sense of effectance. In other words, we ‘mak[e] sense by making sentient’ (Waytz, Morewedge et al. 2010: 410). Second, sociality motivation, or our desire to form social connections with others, may also affect our perception of potentially relevant cues (Waytz, Gray et al. 2010: 384). Lonely people are more likely to ascribe mental states to pets or hold stronger beliefs in the presence of God (Epley et al. 2008), while people with a strong desire to be a part of a group are more sensitive to social cues (Pickett et al. 2004). Inversely, the absence of such motivation may be linked to our tendency to attribute less mind to entities we plan to eat (Bastian et al. 2012), to victims of suffering, and people we dislike (Kozak et al. 2006). Such factors represent only a small portion of those likely to be involved in mind attribution, and which continue to emerge in psychological research. Given the recurring significance of attention to perceptual cues in these accounts, the factors affecting mind attribution may yet be extended to include any conditions that affect our attentional processing, including the dispositional alertness and orientation of the individual perceiver (or reader) suggested in cognitive stylistics (Oakley 2009; Stockwell 2009: 44–53). Drawing on the patterns emerging in psychological research, the richness or complexity of the minds we attribute to others appears to be influenced, in basic terms, by the cues we are presented with, the knowledge we draw upon, and the attention we allocate according to our individual motives and dispositions. If, as is claimed in cognitive linguistics, language processing relies upon the same cognitive mechanisms involved in perception, these findings offer potential insights for stylistic analysis. If reading draws upon processes of attention and knowledge activation, linguistic representations of individuals in texts should be subject to these same influencing factors. Social psychology also offers valuable insights for the consequences of mind attribution in texts. First, the attribution of mental states can be seen as closely related to the experience of empathy (Section 2.6). In Hodges and Wegner’s (1997) model, empathy is a state of mind that may be automatically stimulated by our environment, or carefully controlled through the seeking-out or avoidance of cues. Following this view, it is a desire to avoid a vicarious sharing of thoughts and feelings that causes me to look away from a murder scene in a horror film – to divert attention away from the cues for mind attribution, and the opportunity for empathy with the victim’s suffering, or the villain’s murderous intent. By associating our understanding and sharing of mental states in terms of selective attention to relevant cues, the factors affecting mind attribution can be viewed as directly relevant to readers’ empathetic experiences.

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The richness of the minds we attribute also has important consequences for our ethical judgements. In everyday life, many sensitive ethical debates about the rights and responsibilities of individuals in society centre on matters of mind attribution (Haslam 2006; Morewedge et al. 2013: 1196). For example, moral positions on animal rights and abortion, and the social policies that result from them, often hinge on the degree to which the animal or foetus is attributed consciousness. Furthermore, attributions of different types of mind have separate consequences for our ethical judgements. Gray et al. (2007) showed that people intuitively perceive minds in terms of two dimensions: experience (the capacity to sense and feel) and agency (the capacity to plan and act). In their experiment, the attribution of mental states associated with experience, for example, pleasure, fear and pain, correlated with participants’ judgements of entities as moral patients – in Aristotle’s sense (2009) – who might have right or wrong done to them. Meanwhile, attribution of states associated with agency, for example, thought, planning and memory, correlated with judgements of them as moral agents, whose actions might be right or wrong. This ‘two-dimensional representation’ of mind (Waytz, Gray et al. 2010: 383) has emerged in other independent frameworks, most notably as ‘human nature’ and ‘human essence’ in discussions of humanness (Haslam et al. 2005) and ‘warmth’ and ‘competence’ in social categorization (Fiske et al. 2007). Given this recurring division in our understandings of others, and the ‘moral typecasting’ of entities in these terms (Gray and Wegner 2009), our attribution of mind can be seen to be bound up with our basic appreciation of ethics (Gray et al. 2012). Our attribution of mental states to entities in this way can be seen as ‘a special kind of causal inference’, without which the interactions between entities around us would appear random and unpredictable (Morewedge et  al. 2007:  2; also Heider 1958: 31–2). Essentially, then, mind attribution is a means through which we impose structure on reality as part of a construal. Theoretically, the operation of such mind construal in and alongside event construal through language can be seen to reflect the close relationship often observed in philosophy between action’s mental and physical dimensions (Wittgenstein 1958:  179; Clark and Chalmers 1998:  10). In practical terms, by incorporating mind attribution into the CG model of construal, the factors affecting this process: the characteristics of the entities perceived and the knowledge and motivations of the perceivers, can be related to the linguistic choices made by authors, narrators and characters. An important consequence of linguistic choices in terms of transitivity, I argue, lies in the degree of mind attribution prompted in readers, and the empathetic and ethical relationships with the participants invited as a result. In the remainder of this chapter, I apply this developed understanding of construal to I Am Legend. I explore the degree of mind attribution invited for its characters at key points in the narrative, through the linguistic patterns seen in the construal of its fictional world.

6.4 Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend (1954) has accumulated considerable cultural significance in the sixty years since its publication. Regarded as a ‘milestone in modern

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Gothic fiction’ (Clasen 2010:  313), I Am Legend has been adapted for film four times: The Last Man on Earth (1964), The Omega Man (1971), I Am Legend (2007) and recent parody I Am Virgin (2010). The novel is often credited with a yet wider impact on popular culture: cited as a major influence for prolific horror writer, Stephen King (2006) and for director of Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero (McConnell 2008). Variously classified as ‘science fiction’, ‘fantasy’ and ‘horror’, the novel can be considered an example of the wider category of ‘speculative fiction’ alongside the other texts analysed in this book (Clasen 2010: 314). The novel describes a postapocalyptic version of Los Angeles in 1976, in which a mysterious pandemic has transformed the population into murderous vampires. Robert Neville, the novel’s main character and focalizer, is immune to the disease and is seemingly the last uninfected human on Earth. The novel presents the experiences of Neville over a period of three years, with the narrative’s four ‘Parts’ shifting forward in time from January 1976 to March 1976, June 1978 and January 1979, respectively. In Parts I  and II, we see Neville engaged in a struggle for survival:  preyed upon by hordes of vampires in his barricaded home by night, hunting and slaying dormant vampires by day. Also increasingly apparent is Neville’s psychological struggle with the loneliness, fear and sexual frustration which accompanies this solitary existence, the impact of which can be seen in his angry outbursts and heavy alcohol consumption. The only form of companionship left to Neville in his ‘forced isolation’ (Matheson 2001:  53) is his infected and now seemingly insane former neighbour, Ben Cortman, who lurks outside his house at night, shouting ‘Come out, Neville!’ (p.  14). As the narrative continues, Neville attempts to uncover the biological cause of the vampires, carrying out experiments on infected individuals – usually women – which, though failing to produce a cure for the bacterial infection responsible, lead to an increasing understanding of the various ‘living’ and ‘dead’ varieties, and more efficient ways of destroying them (p. 109). Meanwhile, through intermittent flashbacks, readers learn of Neville’s loss of his wife Virginia and daughter Kathy to the vampire disease, and the widespread panic and religious hysteria which surrounded the outbreak. In Part III, we see Neville two years later. While out hunting vampires, Neville suddenly meets an apparently ‘normal’, uninfected woman, Ruth (p.  118). Just as Neville has grown to trust Ruth, he discovers from a sample of her blood that she is infected. Attacking Neville with his mallet and escaping, Ruth leaves behind a letter explaining that a group of those infected have developed medication to allow them to live with their disease and have begun to build a new society. For the members of this society, it is revealed, Neville is a murderer who comes by day to kill their loved ones in their sleep:  a source of terror and superstition. As one of the ‘living vampires’, and the wife of one of those murdered by Neville during his daily rounds, Ruth was a spy sent to observe him in preparation for his capture. In Part IV, six months later, a group of these infected people arrive outside Neville’s home, killing the (true) vampires that lurk there before capturing and imprisoning Neville himself. The novel closes with Neville’s transformed understanding of the vampires’ thoughts and feelings, and his own actions towards them, as he looks out of his cell window and faces public execution.

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In comparison to the texts analysed in the previous two chapters, Matheson’s novel has received relatively little critical attention. Those literary critical discussions of I Am Legend that do exist consider the narrative in terms of its historical context, regarding the novel as a reflection of the specific sociocultural anxieties of its time of production. The novel’s depiction of the extinction of humanity is said to reflect a fear of nuclear holocaust and Communist threat within its Cold War context (Oakes 2000; Clasen 2010). Furthermore, Neville’s barricaded existence in his suburban home, his conflicting feelings of hatred, revulsion and sexual desire towards the vampires, and misogynistic treatment of the female vampires in particular, have been variously interpreted as reflective of mounting racial tensions (Patterson 2005), a crisis in postwar masculinity (Murphy 2009) and prevalent views of homosexuality (Khader 2013), as a product of 1950s America. In his discussion of the novel, Clasen (2010) notes the limits of such accounts, observing the ‘continued fascination’ instilled in contemporary readers of this novel and its ‘power to engage and to disturb in contexts far removed from that of its production’ (2010:  313). In accounting for this continued impact, Clasen (2010: 314–15) describes the novel as one which ‘taps into an intuitive understanding of human nature’ or ‘evolved folk psychology’ to capture a ‘universal human fear’ of being cut off from social contact. Through the use of narrative techniques such as internal focalization and free indirect discourse, he argues, Matheson constructs a ‘psychologically realistic protagonist’ (2010:  321) and invites readers to empathize with his horrific situation: Matheson, by accurately and minutely describing Robert Neville’s reactions, thoughts and emotions, allows his readership to engage with his story and to imagine what it’s like to be alone in a hostile world. (p. 325)

Reader responses to the novel on Goodreads In order to enrich this limited literary critical discussion and test some of its claims, I  collected a sample of the hundred most recent reviews of I Am Legend from Goodreads (2015e) using the methodology outlined previously (Section 1.3) (this dataset referenced throughout as GR-3). Supporting Clasen’s (2010) proposals, a commonly observed theme in my sample concerns readers’ empathetic engagement with the main character. The following examples are typical of the kinds of responses seen: He describes the thoughts of the main character, Robert Neville, with extreme detail. It is like you are in the mind of him. He draws you into the book so far that you can become attached to the characters. (R51, GR-3) The book did a really great job at getting me to empathize with Robert; I  was feeling all his ups and down throughout the book, and let me just say, THAT WAS SO STRESSFUL. It was depressing and sad, and you start to feel hopeful at

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times, but man, this book. THIS BOOK. I didn’t think I would, but I really liked it. (R27, GR-3) This story is about loneliness and solitude, showing us how a man copes without the most basic human need, physical/emotional contact [. . .] you believe that such creatures can exist, join him as he desperately finds a cure and reminisces about his past in brief yet hauntingly tragic fl ashbacks. The horror feels intense yet real and when you think you’ve had enough it cranks up to eleven. (R59, GR-3)

Further supporting Clasen’s argument, reviewers often describe an experience of suspense/fear in relation to this fictional world, for example, describing a sense of ‘terror’ (R30, GR-3), ‘horror’ (R51, GR-3) and ‘suspense’ (R1, GR-3), which might also be associated with an empathetic engagement with this character’s experiences. One reviewer states: ‘This creeped me out. Imagining such a lonely, ominous world like the one the protagonist lives in is scary beyond belief ’ (R83, GR-3). However, looking more closely at this group of responses reveals greater complexity in these empathetic experiences than is suggested by Clasen (2010). Significantly, in reviews such as those below, Neville appears to invite empathy even as aspects of his personality are observed that are unlikeable: Matheson shows us how Neville reacts to the death of his wife and child; how hope and despair intertwine as he is trying to coope with the fact that he is the last living man on Earth. The prose is simply brilliant and even though Neville isn’t exactly likeable, with scenes like the one with the dog or when he has to bury his wife you cannot help but feel pity for him. (R82, GR-3) The novel had me so tense in places that I was almost screaming out at the pages of the book. I felt the main characters pain, solitude and deep sadness at the loss of his love, life and the horrific existance he now endured. Despite that I found it hard to like him. Maybe I wasn’t suppose to like him. Still, even though I didn’t bond with the main character it didn’t stop me being enthralled by the story right through to the end. (R61, GR-3)

Other readers describe even stronger negative feelings towards this ‘unappealing’ (R55, GR-3) or ‘very very unlikable’ character (R25, GR-3), his angry outbursts and views of the female vampires in particular, which render the invited empathetic experience of his thoughts and feelings uncomfortable: Some of the author’s descriptors are very effective in portraying just how lonely it is for the protagonist, the sole survivor of an epidemic. His inner dialogues (and they are dialogues for he is often arguing with himself) are quite powerful. But oh dear is this a frighteningly sexist book! This sole survivor is a misogynistic man who seems to be dancing on the line of justifying rape, in addition to thinking of women as idiots who should be used. Indeed he even says at one point that one of

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the other characters was ‘just a woman’. Disappointing and made me NOT root for him at all. Because he was a jerk. (R4, GR-3) For me, that’s really the bottom line – I cannot stand Robert Neville. I can’t stand his ‘why me’ resigned whining, or his scathing and disgusting views on women, or his self loathing or his drinking problem. [. . .] So from what I can tell, it’s peoples’ views on the Neville character that polarize the reviews so much. People who love the book like being in Neville’s head. People who hate it can’t stand being in Neville’s head. I fell into the latter category. (R37, GR-3)

Alongside their varied experiences of this main character, readers in my sample also frequently comment upon the impact of the ending, and often in highly positive terms. Reviewers typically describe this ending as ‘shocking’ (R51, GR-3) and ‘thoughtprovoking’ (R23, GR-3) in its modification of their judgement of Neville, and the wider moral reconsideration of the characters it invites: It is also wacky that the end shifts your perception of Robert all along; I am still unsure how I feel about him [hero or not?]. (R20, GR-3) The ending with the reversal of roles was interesting, but I felt I knew too little about this new society and it’s ‘people’ to let it really sink in, they were still the bad guys in my eyes. (R33, GR-3) ‘I Am Legend’ has one of the most epic twists of any book I’ve read. I’m still wrapping my head around it as I was blind-sided by it last night (then spent a huge chunk of the night dreaming it!) [. . .] I imagine the re-read will be far more chilling in light of knowing the twist. (R99, GR-3)

Such responses, however, can be contrasted with other reviews in my sample, in which this ending is described not as shocking, but rather as ‘appropriate’ (R72, GR3), ‘perfect and logical’ (R70, GR-3), and one which ‘made sense’ (R74, GR-3). The following reviewer describes this ‘satisfying’ experience in more detail, as one which confirmed their negative views of Neville all along: I was relieved when at the end I was not alone in my thoughts that he was a monster who had no place in the world anymore, because there were times while reading I wasn’t sure if that was the intended effect he was supposed to be having. I was worried what I found so horribly off putting, was just some sort of 50’s machismo patriarchal idea of a virile manly man who’s isolated in a vampire apocalypse. Which to read the reviews a lot of people do seem to have thought of him as a hero, which makes my brain and heart hurt, so I’ll leave it at that. The ending was satisfying, the twist was what I needed to convince me this read was worthwhile. (R40, GR-3)

Finally, my analysis of this dataset suggests that in I Am Legend, as in Never Let Me Go, understandings of human experientiality and identity, and judgements of

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the characters in these terms (or questions of ethics and humanness) is once again a recurring feature of this novel’s interpretation and experience. As one reviewer in this sample describes, this novel is ‘about what it mean[s] to be human in an inhuman situation. Or even human when you aren’t’ (R14, GR-3). In the following analysis, I account for these varied empathetic and ethical experiences of Matheson’s novel in terms of the character minds they are invited to construct as part of its construal. As was suggested by Clasen (2010), the (often uncomfortable) empathy that many readers experience for Robert Neville, and the resulting impact of the novel’s concluding plot twist, might be related to the internal focalization of this main character and the detailed representation of his thoughts and feelings through techniques such as free indirect discourse. Also significant, I shall argue, are the minds constructed for the other characters in this fictional world – the vampires that plague Neville. I argue that the recurring manipulation of mind attribution through linguistic patterns in the construal of action can be attributed to a distinctive mind style for its character-focalizer.

6.5 Thought representation in I Am Legend The clearest contribution to our experience of Robert Neville in I Am Legend is the explicit representation of his mental states. Forms of access to the inner life of a character have long been regarded in narratology as an important device for the facilitation of empathy (see Keen 2006: 219–20 for a review). Significantly, this is often held to be the case even when the character is presented in a negative light. Booth (1987: 278), for example, asserts that ‘inside views can build sympathy even for the most vicious character’. For Leech and Short (2007:  276–8) forms of consciousness representation such as free indirect thought and (free) direct thought, in particular, represent a departure from the ‘norm’ for thought representation (indirect thought) which invites a sense of increased vividness and immediacy in our access to the mind of a character, and a movement towards empathetic alignment. In I Am Legend, the mental states of its focalizer Robert Neville are presented through a range of thought presentation techniques (Leech and Short 2007). In the opening page of the novel, the use of spatial and temporal deixis (in bold) can be seen to align the third-person, past-tense narration with this character’s focalized perspective as an example of free indirect thought: 6a. On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back. [. . .] After violent attacks, the planks were often split or partially pried off, and he had to replace them completely; a job he hated. Today only one plank was loose. Isn’t that amazing? He thought. (Matheson 2001: 7, emphasis added) A few pages later, further use of now proximal deixis in a parallel description invites readers to share in a sense of impeding threat alongside this character:

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6b. The sky was darkening and it was getting chilly. He looked up and down Cimarron Street, the cool breeze ruffling his blond hair. That was what was wrong with these cloudy days; you never knew when they were coming. (p. 12, emphasis added) Another prominent technique in the representation of this character’s consciousness is the use of direct thought. In extract (6a), for example, use of this device reveals the characteristic frustration and sarcasm with which Neville confronts his daily routine:  ‘Isn’t that amazing? He thought’. Significantly, while direct thought, like free indirect thought, is said to represent a movement into ‘the active mind of the character’ (Leech and Short 2007: 277), since direct perception of someone’s thoughts is not physically possible, this mode of thought representation is said to gain a sense of artificiality, or a ‘conscious quality’, as though the character were ‘ “talking” to himself ’ (2007:  274). As the opening chapter progresses, use of this technique in a manner mirroring spoken conversation can be seen to exaggerate this ‘conscious quality’ in a way which suggests the loneliness and mental turmoil of this isolated character: 6c. Some things could go to pot, but not his health, he thought. Then why don’t you stop pouring alcohol into yourself? He thought. Why don’t you shut the hell up? He thought. (p. 15) These forms of thought representation and their consequences for readers’ experiences of Neville across this third-person narrative will be returned to in terms of the CG model of perspective in Section 6.7. In terms of mind attribution, the use of such forms in the opening chapter provides a set of highly prominent cues for the attribution of a rich and complex mind to this character. Also introduced in the opening chapter are the as-yet-unidentified figures, or ‘they’ (6a, 6b), responsible for these attacks on Neville’s house. Unlike Neville, no access to these characters’ mental states is given. Further, the construal of these characters can be seen to actively limit readers’ attribution of mental states to them as part of their conceptualization of the fictional world. In extracts (6d) and (6e), sunset has arrived and the vampires are now gathered outside Neville’s house: 6d. From the speaker over the hallway door, the music of Schönberg was playing loudly. Not loudly enough, though. He still heard them outside, their murmuring and their walkings about and their cries, their snarling and fighting among themselves. Once in a while a rock or brick thudded off the house. Sometimes a dog barked. And they were all there for the same thing. (p. 12) 6e. the silence didn’t really help. He could still see them out there, the white-faced men prowling around his house, looking ceaselessly for a way to get in at him. Some of them, probably, crouching on their haunches like dogs, eyes glittering at the house, teeth slowly grating together; back and forth, back and forth. (p. 16)

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Applying CG, use of the present participles ‘murmuring’, ‘snarling and fighting among themselves’ (6d), ‘prowling’, ‘looking ceaselessly’, ‘crouching’, ‘glittering’, ‘grating’ (6e), and nominalizations ‘walkings about’, ‘cries’ (6d) invites the reader to conceptualize the vampires’ behaviour here through summary scanning (Langacker 2008: 117–22). As described in Section 3.4 (see also Chapter 4), such scanning involves examining the component states of these processes in a cumulative manner, building up to a gestalt conception which is apprehended whole, as opposed to sequential scanning – the prototypical means through which we track events through real time. By inviting readers to apprehend the vampires’ actions in this way, this construal can be said to atemporalize these processes and reduce attention to their component states (Langacker 2008:  122). Here, combined with the adverbials ‘once in a while’, ‘sometimes’ (6d), and ‘back and forth, back and forth’ (6e), such processing invites a sense of these actions as repetitive and predictable. Meanwhile, in terms of perspective (Section 3.4), our attention to this behaviour – the ‘object of conception’ – is distracted in both extracts by the prominent ‘on stage’ presence of Neville – the ‘subject’ of this conception – and his frustration at ‘still’ (6d, 6e) being able to hear and see them. Drawing on the research described in Section 6.3, self-propelled, goal-directed and irregular motion can be seen as a strong invitation for mind attribution. Here, instead of conceptualizing the vampires’ behaviour directly, and the cues for mind attribution it might present, we are invited to experience it as Neville does from inside his barricaded house: as a vague, atemporalized and uniform impression in the background of our focused attention. The construal of this behaviour is subjective, ‘inhering in the subject rather than the object of conception’ (Langacker 2008: 537) and can be seen to give rise to an attenuated simulation of the action, diminished in intensity or vividness. Drawing on simulation theory accounts of mind attribution (Section 2.5), the manipulation of readers’ attention to the vampires’ behaviour through this subjective construal, and its resulting attenuation of their mental simulation, might be seen to limit readers’ understanding of these characters’ actions in terms of thoughts, feelings and motivations. Alongside the limitation of mind attribution through simulation, this construal can also be seen to suppress readers’ inferencing of the vampires’ minds through the application of knowledge, or a ‘theory’ of other minds (Section 2.5). Referred to only as ‘they’ in these opening pages, and lacking an antecedent for this pronoun, the construal of these characters is highly unspecific. Our conceptualization of these characters gains in granularity as the narrative continues through references which progressively increase in specificity:  ‘filthy bastards’ (Matheson 2001:  11), ‘the women’ (p. 12), ‘the white-faced men’ (p. 16), before ‘they’ are finally identified as vampires in Chapter  2  – though indirectly through negation:  ‘His father had died denying the vampire violently to the last’ (p. 21). This progressive elaboration (Langacker 2008: 17) is significant as, once specified, readers’ attribution of minds for these characters will draw upon their schematic knowledge of vampires, their associations and intertextual links, from Dracula to The Twilight Saga. In the terms set out in Section 5.3, this construal disrupts comprehension by failing to activate the relevant knowledge in the reader (reader–character relationship type A). Here, by delaying comprehension in this way, Matheson adds an element of uncertainty to our

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reading of these characters. Although readers may suspect that the ‘thing’ they are ‘there for’ in extract (6d) is to kill Neville, they are given little opportunity to confirm this attributed intention at this point in the novel, nor gain an understanding of the mental states that accompany it. As described in Section 6.3, mind attribution is motivated by, and to some extent satisfies, our desire for effectance, or ‘understanding, predictability and control’ (Waytz, Gray et  al. 2010:  412). In the opening chapter of I Am Legend, disruption to this process in readers, I suggest, plays a significant role in the establishment of an empathetic relationship with Neville by contributing to a felt lack of effectance alongside this character. The atemporalized, subjective and unspecific construals of the attackers though the mind of this character, and the uncertainty this evokes, might also be seen to contribute to the experience of ‘fear’ and ‘suspense’ which Goodreads readers describe in relation to this text, and which arguably characterizes it as horror fiction (Section 6.4). Developing the literary critical accounts reviewed, the fears evoked by this text may therefore extend beyond the specific anxieties of its historical context into a ‘universal human fear’ (Clasen 2010: 314) of the unknown and uncontrollable. Once activated, knowledge of the vampires is not straightforward in terms of expectations of mind. As an example of the ‘strange concepts’ manipulated in fiction (Zunshine 2008), the vampire blurs the taxonomic distinction between human and animal and disrupts our assessments of sentience and empathy, as described in Section 6.3. Moreover, Matheson’s science fictional adaptation of this myth unsettles readers’ culturally acquired knowledge of vampires, and their minds in particular, throughout the text. While Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ is cunning and passionate4, Matheson’s vampires are more ambiguously minded, as Neville’s own struggles with mind attribution suggest: ‘Why didn’t they leave him alone? Did they think they could all have him? Were they so stupid they thought that? Why did they keep coming every night?’ (Matheson 2001: 14, original emphasis). As the novel continues, the nature and richness of the vampires’ mental states is increasingly called into question, as he debates the extent to which the vampires are still human and the extent of the difference between them and himself (p. 26, 109). Neville’s search for an understanding of the entities around him through mind attribution, and the effectance which would result, can be seen as the driving force of the narrative plot, and the empathetic engagement invited in readers.

6.6 Action chains and agency Linguistic choices in the construal of the vampires continue to disrupt mind attribution for readers throughout the text. Such manipulations of mind attribution are prominent in scenes in which Neville comes into direct contact with the vampires. At these key points in the narrative, and in reader’s developing impressions of the characters, mind attribution is limited through the nature of the action chains in which these characters are profiled as participants.

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Extract (6f) is from a particularly dramatic scene in the novel, in which Neville returns home after sunset and is faced head-on with the vampires outside his house: 6f. Out of the corner of an eye he saw a man come rushing out of a house and start chasing the car. Then, as he turned the corner with a screech of clinging tires, he couldn’t hold back his gasp. They were all in front of his house, waiting. A sound of helpless terror filled his throat. He didn’t want to die. He might have thought about it, even contemplated it. But he didn’t want to die. Not like this. Now he saw them all turn their white faces at the sound of the motor. Some more of them came running out of the open garage and his teeth ground together in impotent fury. What a stupid, brainless way to die! Now he saw them start running straight toward the station wagon, a line of them across the street. And, suddenly, he knew he couldn’t stop. He pressed down on the accelerator, and in a moment the car went plowing through them, knocking three of them aside like tenpins. He felt the car frame jolt as it struck the bodies. Their screaming white faces went flashing by his window, their cries chilling his blood. Now they were behind and he saw in the rear-view mirror that they were all pursuing him. A sudden plan caught hold in his mind, and impulsively he slowed down, even braking, until the speed of the car fell to thirty, then twenty miles an hour. He looked back and saw them gaining, saw their gray-ish-white faces approaching, their dark eyes fastened to his car, to him. Suddenly, he twitched with shock as a snarl sounded nearby and, jerking his head around, he saw the crazed face of Ben Cortman beside the car. Instinctively his foot jammed down on the gas pedal, but his other foot slipped off the clutch, and with a neck-snapping jolt the station wagon jumped forward and stalled. Sweat broke out on his forehead as he lunged forward feverishly to press the button. Ben Cortman clawed in at him. With a snarl he shoved the cold white hand aside. ‘Neville, Neville!’ Ben Cortman reached in again, his hands like claws cut from ice. Again Neville pushed aside the hand and jabbed at the starter button, his body shaking helplessly. Behind, he could hear them all screaming excitedly as they came closer to the car. (p. 37–8, emphasis in original) In many of the clauses which make up this narrative sequence, Neville is once again made prominent as the subject of conception, for example, through repeated uses of ‘he saw’ (five times). Again, as part of this subjective construal through Neville, the actions of the vampires are construed in a way which limits or disrupts readers’

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attribution of mental states. In the action chains seen in this extract, the vampires are most frequently profiled as a mover in relation to a spatial location or entity as landmark. Vampires as mover: a man come rushing out of a house [a man] start chasing the car them all turn their white faces at the sound of the motor more of them came running out of the open garage them start running straight toward the station wagon Their screaming white faces went flashing by his window they were all pursuing him them gaining their gray-ish white faces approaching Ben Cortman clawed in at him Ben Cortman reached in again they came closer to the car

This construal of the vampires’ actions can be contrasted with the construal of Neville most often as an experiencer and agent in action chains, and often with a clearly profiled object or patient: Neville as experiencer: he saw a man He didn’t want to die He might have thought about it [He might have] even contemplated it He saw them all turn He saw them start running he knew he couldn’t stop He felt the car frame jolt he saw in the rear-view mirror that.. He looked back [He] saw them gaining [He] saw their gray-ish-white faces he saw the crazed face he could hear them all.

Neville as agent: He pressed down on the accelerator he couldn’t stop braking jerking his head around he lunged forward feverishly to press the button he shoved the cold white hand Neville pushed aside the hand [Neville] jabbed at the starter button.

In CG, ‘the key factor in transitivity is conceptual in nature – roughly, the degree of approximation to a canonical agent-patient interaction’ (Langacker 2008: 387; see also Martínez 2002:  642). In the clauses identified above, the construal of the vampires’ behaviour can be seen to depart considerably from this prototypical interaction. Movers depart from our agent prototype through their ambiguous energy source,

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which may be internal or external, with the result that movers are ‘equally likely to be inanimate or animate’ (Langacker 2008: 356). Drawing on the psychological research outlined in Section 6.3, we can say that the ambiguity of the energy source for this motion (as ‘self-propelled’ or ‘caused’ – Premack 1990) means ambiguity with regard to mind attribution. In extract (6f), the attention to the vampires’ trajectory invited by prepositions such as ‘out of ’, ‘straight towards’, ‘by’, ‘in at’ and the nominal ‘a line of them’ suggests an absence of mental states by implying the linear quality associated with inanimate, caused motion (e.g. that of one billiard ball hitting another). In addition to this questionable energy source, these movers lack an energy sink, or goal. The profiling of a spatial location or entity as the landmark for this process through such prepositions departs from the prototypical role of patient within an action chain, thus reducing the sense of goal-directedness which could otherwise act as a cue for mind attribution (e.g. Premack 1990). In transitivity analyses such as those discussed earlier in this chapter, the lack of a goal for material processes is often said to result in an impression of activity as ineffectual and lacking in conscious reflection on the part of the actor (Halliday 1971; Kennedy 1982; Simpson 2004; Simpson and Canning 2014). The same effect applies here, this time creating a sense of the zombie-like nature of these characters’ actions. The closest we get to a prototypically agentive, goal-directed process for the vampires here is ‘Ben Cortman clawed in at him’, and even this seems ineffectual and mindless through the prominence of its trajectory (‘in at’) at the expense of its patient. Drawing on the CG model of action chains, such interpretative effects can be understood in cognitive terms. Further linguistic patterns can be seen to contribute to this limited mind attribution for the vampires. The recurring present participle ‘ing’ form seen in the construal of the vampires’ actions here, as in extracts (6d) and (6e) earlier, once again atemporalizes these processes through summary scanning. Following Langacker (2008:  20), this form also imposes a limited ‘immediate scope’ upon the action, which excludes ‘the beginning and end’ of the vampires’ trajectory from reader attention. The use of this form has been described in previous applications of CG as a means of accessing an event from an ‘internal perspective’, creating a sense of immediacy (Verspoor 1996: 438) or ‘conceptual proximity’ (Giovanelli 2014: 160–62) which seems applicable to the impact of this dramatic scene. By excluding the energy source and energy sink of the action from focused attention, this construal of the vampires’ actions might have further significance here in backgrounding the cues for mind attribution that their self-propelled, goal-directed activity could otherwise represent. The opposite might be said for Neville’s construal. Neville’s profiled participation in more prototypical agent–patient interactions through his perceptions and actions, are largely described in the simple past tense: ‘he saw’, ‘he felt’, ‘he lunged’, etc. By prompting sequential scanning of these processes in readers alongside this character, and attention to both the energy source and energy sink profiled, this construal can be seen to invite a rich attribution of the panic and fear which underlies Neville’s actions, and an empathetic experience of this ‘heart-pounding chase’ (R59, GR-3; Section 6.4).

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A further aspect of the construal in extract (6f) of significance for mind attribution is the repeated profiling of body parts or objects as agents or movers within action chains: Body parts as agents/movers: their gray-ish-white faces approaching their dark eyes fastened to his car screaming white faces went flashing by his window his teeth ground together in impotent fury A sudden plan caught hold in his mind his foot jammed down on the gas pedal his other foot slipped off the clutch his body shaking helplessly

Objects as agents/movers: the car went plowing through them the car frame jolt as it struck the bodies the station wagon jumped forward and stalled

In Section 6.2 such meronymic and metonymic agency was said to contribute to a diminished sense of intentionality, awareness or control in the human-actor responsible (Simpson 2004: 77). Here these linguistic choices again restrict readers’ attention to a specific portion of the action chain, here between instrument and patient, thus backgrounding the energy source (or conscious mind) behind this action and the cues for mind attribution it presents. Notably, this construal is seen here both for the vampires’ actions (e.g. ‘their grey-ish white faces approaching’) and those of Neville (e.g. ‘his foot jammed down on the gas pedal’). This construal may be said, therefore, to invite not only a diminished appreciation of the vampires’ mental states, but also a sense of Neville’s experiences as his body reacts ‘instinctively’ (6f). Altogether, these linguistic patterns invite a direct comparison with Halliday’s (1971) analysis of Golding’s The Inheritors and Simpson’s (1993) analysis of Pincher Martin, where a lack of goal-directed clauses of action and a lack of human subjects is said to create a sense of ‘activity and helplessness’ (Simpson 1993: 105). While once again demonstrating these same effects, Matheson’s novel provides clear support for the context dependence of a higher-level interpretation of these impressions (Simpson 1993), as here similar effects contribute to a representation of the undead, and the limited understanding of their minds in the character who perceives them. In I Am Legend, these linguistic patterns can be seen to have significant consequences for our ethical interpretation of the characters. Alongside the construal of the vampires’ actions as attackers, similar patterns can also be identified in those scenes in which the vampires are patients, and specifically, the objects of Neville’s violence and sexual desire. In extract (6g), we see Neville out hunting vampires by day for the first time:

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6g. There were two of them. In the living room, lying on a couch, was a woman about thirty years old, wearing a red housecoat. Her chest rose and fell slowly as she lay there, eyes closed, her hands clasped over her stomach. Robert Neville’s hands fumbled on the stake and mallet. It was always hard when they were alive; especially with women. He could feel that senseless demand returning again, tightening his muscles. He forced it down. It was insane, there was no rational argument for it. She made no sound except for a sudden, hoarse intake of breath. As he walked into the bedroom, he could hear a sound like the sound of water running. Well, what else can I do? he asked himself, for he still had to convince himself he was doing the right thing. He stood in the bedroom doorway, staring at the small bed by the window, his throat moving, breath shuddering in his chest. Then, driven on, he walked to the side of the bed and looked down at her. Why do they all look like Kathy to me? he thought, drawing out the second stake with shaking hands. (p. 20, original emphasis) Here, the action chain profile for Neville’s killing of the woman and child is again restricted, with readers invited to attend only to the instruments involved: ‘the stake and mallet’, ‘the second stake’, and Neville’s ‘shaking hands’. Similarly, following this passage we learn that: ‘After lunch, he went from house to house and used up all his stakes. He had forty seven stakes’ (p. 22). Through their restricted profiling, these descriptions exclude the agent, patient and trajectory of this self-propelled, goal-directed activity from focused attention. Significantly, by reducing readers’ attention to both the agent and patient in this action chain, the mental states which underlie both the causes and effects of this action – the intentions, desires and possible enjoyment of this violence by Neville, and the thoughts and feelings of the vampires as its recipients – are less likely to be perceived, and to a lesser degree of richness. Drawing on the research outlined in Section 6.3, Matheson’s manipulation of the minds we attribute can be seen to have consequences for our ethical judgement of this pivotal scene. In extract (6g), by reducing the attribution of mental states to Neville as an agent with intentions, beliefs and responsibility, our judgement of his actions as a ‘moral agent’ might also be lessened. Equally, in the case of the woman and child, our sense of their ability to experience emotions and pain and thus hold rights as ‘moral patients’ is likely to be less prominent (Gray et al. 2007). By reducing readers’ attention to the minds of these characters, this construal may thus alleviate a negative ethical judgement of Neville’s actions to some extent. However, readers also draw upon their schematic knowledge as the basis of mind attributions, and will also differ in their individual motivations and dispositions. In extract (6g), details such as ‘thirty years old’, ‘housecoat’ and ‘small bed’ invite an inferential fleshing out of these characters as human beings, which will vary between readers. Furthermore, the lack of description of the killings themselves is perhaps one which readers will notice, creating a ‘narrative gap’ (Hardy 2005) which they can inferentially fill out, despite the linguistic absence of these actions from the text’s transitivity profile (Simpson and Canning 2014: 299).

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The resulting experience for many readers, I would suggest, is a sense of the ethical turmoil reflected in Neville’s own thoughts: ‘It was always hard when they were alive’, ‘Well what else can I do?’ (6g). Through manipulations of mind attribution, I argue, readers are encouraged to empathize with Neville, and the psychological struggle he experiences, despite his ethically dubious actions. Differing in degree among readers, this conflict may contribute to the sense of discomfort expressed by reviewers such as those identified in Section 6.4 towards this invitation for empathy. The fact that such readers often specify the source of their dislike for Neville in his treatment of the female vampires and talk about these characters as moral patients (R37, GR-3; R40, GR-3; R4, GR-3) lends support to this analysis. Also contributing to such conflicting mind attribution and the ethical judgements which result is the physical description of these characters. Research into ‘objectification’ in social psychology (Section 6.3), suggests that focused attention upon the bodies of individuals (e.g. in pornographic imagery) influences the attribution of mental states. Specifically, it has been suggested that body focusing reduces attributions of mental states associated with ‘agency’ to a target (e.g. intentions and planning), while increasing attributions of mental states associated with ‘experience’ (e.g. pleasure and pain) (Gray, Knobe et al. 2011). This factor in mind attribution seems applicable to I Am Legend, in which Neville’s treatment of the vampires is often explicitly linked with his sexual feelings towards them. In extract (6g) the extensive focusing on the bodies of both the woman (‘chest’, ‘eyes’, ‘hands’, ‘stomach’ in the first paragraph) and Neville (hands’, ‘muscles’, ‘throat’, ‘chest’ throughout) might be said to reduce readers’ inferencing of the woman’s thoughts, intentions and plans, while inviting an understanding of Neville’s ‘senseless’ (or agency-less) physical desire for her. Such bodily focusing, and the reduced attribution of agency it invites for Neville and the vampires can be observed elsewhere within the text. References to the ‘body’ of female vampires are seen in those scenes in which Neville is experimenting on them: 6h. Her hands closed over his wrists and her body began to twist and flop on the rug. Her eyes were still closed, but she gasped and muttered and her body kept trying to writhe out of his grip. Her dark nails dug into his flesh. He tore out of her grasp with a snarl and dragged her the rest of the way by her hair. Usually he felt a twinge when he realized that, but for some affliction he didn’t understand these people were the same as he. But now an experimental fervour had seized him and he could think of nothing else. (p. 34) Again, the reference ‘these people were the same as he’ (6h) can be seen to invite a degree of mind attribution for this character which conflicts with that denied through her objectification, giving rise to a shared sense of the ethical turmoil, or the ‘twinge’ that Neville himself describes. References to Neville’s body, such as ‘his wrists’, ‘his flesh’ (6h), are also seen in abundance throughout the text, inviting an attribution of the ‘mindless’ urges and drives which torment him:

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6i. Deep in his body, the knotting heat began again [. . .] all the words of centuries couldn’t end the wordless, mindless craving of his flesh. (p. 13) References to the movement of Neville’s ‘throat’ (6g) in particular, appear during scenes in which he is contemplating or carrying out violence. Shortly after extract (6h), we read: ‘His throat moved. It wouldn’t last, the feeling of callous brutality. He bit his lips as he watched her’ (p. 34), and elsewhere multiple such references appear in close succession: ‘His throat moved [. . .] His throat moved [. . .] His throat moved convulsively and he shuddered with the repressed craving for violence’ (p. 85). Through its recurring use in such contexts, ‘his throat moved’ seems to become a cue for the reader attribution of specific kinds of mental states (those associated with ‘experience’) and a repression of others (those associated with ‘agency’) for this character. The relationship between objectification and meronymic agency, and the cumulative effects of this linguistic choice, is an interesting question for future stylistic research. In this text, this shared aspect of the characters’ construal can be seen to invite an impression of both Neville and the vampires as possessing a certain kind of mind: specifically, one capable of experience but not agency. As Neville hypothesizes early in the novel with regard to the vampires: ‘their need was their only motivation’ (p.  17). By emphasizing the similarities between Neville and the vampires in this respect, this construal raises important questions for readers’ understanding of them in terms of humanness, and the ethical judgements which result.

6.7 Group participants and group minds A further aspect of the text’s construal of significance for mind attribution is the construal of the vampires as part of a group. For Palmer (2010, 2011a), intermentality, or thinking that is ‘joint, group, shared, or collective’ (2010: 41), represents a key aspect of real-world minds and a significant type of mental functioning to be examined in fiction. While Palmer’s (2011a) discussion of intermentality raises questions for its neural and embodied basis (Hogan 2011:  246; Stockwell 2011:  290), its importance for narrative interpretation has been supported through textual analysis (Semino 2006b, 2011; Gavins 2013). This aspect of fictional minds can again be enriched by research in social psychology, where perception of entitative groups has been shown to result in the attribution of a ‘group mind’, or collective mental states (Bloom and Veres 1999; Waytz and Young 2012). Viewed in terms of attribution, ontological differences between the mind of a single character and that of a couple/organization/society are irrelevant, since both exist in the mind of the perceiver or reader. As Stockwell (2009: 109) observes, ‘both group minds and character minds are, strictly speaking, equally fictional’. In social psychology, the perceived entitativity of groups, manipulated in terms of gestalt features of similarity, proximity and common fate, has been found to inversely affect the extent to which a group and its members are attributed mind (Section 6.3). In CG terms this might be described as a manipulation of the prominence of these

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participants through their manner of processing, and more specifically, as a reversible figure–ground relationship (Section 3.4). When the group is the prominent figure (processed as a whole through summary scanning) the members that make it up are backgrounded in attention, but when the individual participants are made prominent (processed one at a time through sequential scanning) the overall group moves into the ground. Viewed in this way, the factors affecting intermentality, its manipulation and effects within narrative might be examined linguistically. In I Am Legend, the entire population of Earth is presented – at least initially – as a homogenous group, with the single shared intention of killing Neville. In extracts (6a) to (6f), plural references to the vampires as ‘they’ and the summed conceptualization of their collective movements and mental states, for example: ‘they were all here for the same thing’ (6d), reflects a wider pattern in the construal of these vampires as a cohesive unit throughout the text. This collective construal, and the holistic gestalt it invites readers to conceptualize in terms of similarity, proximity and common fate, is foregrounded by a military metaphor in the text: ‘the dark figures stood like silent soldiers on duty’ (Matheson 2001: 17), ‘a battalion of bloodsuckers’ (p. 24). Particularly significant is the tendency to construe the vampires that Neville intends to stake, burn, or experiment on, as part of such a group. At the start of extract (6g), for example, the woman and child are conceptualized as a group prior to their individuation: ‘There were two of them’, and it is the vampire children as a collective ‘they’ who ‘always look like Kathy’. Similarly, while experimenting on the woman seen in extract (6h), Neville thinks of her as ‘one of them’: ‘All right, she’s suffering, he argued with himself, but she’s one of them and she’d kill me gladly if she got the chance. You’ve got to look at it that way, it’s the only way’ (p. 34). Drawing on research into group mind attribution, this collective construal might be seen to induce a ‘group-member mind trade-off ’ in readers (Waytz and Young 2012), whereby the perception of a ‘group mind’ for the vampires, or a shared set of intentions, reduces our attention to the mental states of the individuals involved. Again, this manipulation of mind attribution has significant consequences for our empathetic and ethical experiences of the characters. Just as this construal provides Neville with a means of justifying his actions to himself, by inviting readers to attend to the vampires’ collective intention to kill him, and reducing their attention to the vampire’s individual suffering, this construal might also alleviate readers’ ethical judgements of Neville’s actions to some extent, inviting them to empathize with Neville and his terrible circumstances, as opposed to his victim. This collective construal may also contribute to readers’ experiences of suspense and fear in response to this text (as described in Section 6.4). The presentation of targets as an entitative group has been shown to increase the application of generalized knowledge during mind attribution. For most readers, their knowledge of vampires is likely to contain associations of evil and a negative judgement of moral status. However, this construal may also evoke expectations of wider social significance, reflecting our typical view of groups in general as ‘capable of threat, hate and retaliation even in the absence of diagnostic information’ (Dasgupta et al. 1999:  1000). In this text, Matheson seems to draw explicitly upon such general

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tendencies of group mind attribution through his extension of the military metaphor to include the pre-plague crowds of religious believers, whose behaviour in ‘violent ranks’ is described as ‘a crossfire of frenzied worship’ with ‘clapping hands like the spatter of irregular rifle fire’ (Matheson 2001: 106–9). Taking into account the novel’s Cold War context, Matheson’s extrapolation of such shared fears in his readers can be seen to give this imagined future its horrific impact for readers at the time of its production, and today still. Finally, this manipulation of group mind attribution contributes to the novel’s concluding twist. The novel’s conclusion reveals that far from being the mindless or purely vindictive entities suggested by their focalized construal, the vampires are thinking, feeling beings with complex motivations, fears and beliefs. In the final chapters, readers’ understandings of this world and its inhabitants develop alongside that of Neville through a succession of shifts in the narrative construal and the mind attributions invited. The first of these shifts occurs when, in Part III, Neville suddenly encounters an apparently uninfected woman: 6j. Robert Neville sat gazing at the white spot out in the field for several minutes before he realized that it was moving. [. . .] A woman. [. . .] A woman. Alive. In the daylight. (p. 112, original emphasis) In this extract, a shift is seen from a highly subjective construal, like that seen for the vampires in extracts (6d), (6e) and (6f), to a highly objective construal, in which the reader’s attention is focused entirely upon this object of conception. This sharp redistribution of reader attention can be seen to invite a vivid simulation of the impact of this perceived entity for Neville. Significantly, in the description of the encounter which follows, during which the woman (Ruth) flees in terror, before being caught and dragged home by Neville, this objective construal frequently includes Neville as an onstage participant, or object of conception, alongside her: 6k. Her head jerked up and they looked at each other [. . .] She couldn’t run as fast as he could [. . .] No sound now but the sound of her shoes and his boots thrashing through the heavy grass [. . .] The two of them ran [. . .] Then there was only the sound of gasping and struggling, of their feet scrabbling and slipping on the earth, crackling down the thick grass [. . .] They stood there breathing harshly and looking at each other [. . .] The two of them, the man and the woman, stood facing each other in the great, hot field. (p. 113–16) These two characters are construed collectively through ‘they’ and ‘the two of them’, and the summary scanning invited for their shared actions as experiencers (‘gasping’, ‘breathing’, ‘looking’) and agents (‘thrashing’, ‘struggling’, ‘scrabbling’, ‘slipping’, ‘facing’). This newly formed entitative group can be seen to prompt an attribution of group mind, this time for a considerably smaller ‘intermental

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unit’ (Palmer 2010: 41). By reducing readers’ attention to the individual members of this group, this construal invites an assumption of psychological homogeneity and, more specifically, the impression that these two characters share the same mental states. Later, as the two embrace in a romantic climax, these shared thoughts and feelings are particularly prominent: 6l. Then they were sitting in the darkness, pressing close together, as if all the heat in the world were in their bodies and they would share the warmth between them [. . .] it was just the two of them together, needing each other, survivors of a black terror embracing because they had found each other. (pp. 141–2) The lack of attention to potential differences between the minds of these two characters invited by this collective construal can be seen to lay the groundwork for the next surprise, when Ruth reveals that she is not, in fact, a ‘survivor’, but a spy on behalf of a new society of the living-infected. Through this construal, Neville’s mistaken understanding of Ruth’s thoughts and feelings, and the shock of this revelation, is one that readers are invited to share. Shortly after, a further shift in the construal of this fictional world and its inhabitants is seen as a new subgroup – representatives of this new society – arrive outside Neville’s home: 6m. The dark suited men knew exactly what they were doing. There were about seven vampires visible, six men and a woman. The men surrounded the seven, held their flailing arms, and drove razor-tipped pikes deep into their bodies. Blood spouted out on the dark pavement and the vampires perished one by one. (pp. 148–9) The construal of this entitative group can be directly contrasted with that of the vampires seen in extracts (6d), (6e) and (6f). Here, the ‘dark suited men’ are profiled as an agent in prototypical agent–patient interactions: ‘held their flailing arms’, ‘drove razor tipped pikes deep into their bodies’. This invites a rich appreciation of the collective intentionality underlying their actions, and their ethical responsibilities as moral agents who ‘knew exactly what they were doing’. In addition, the profiling of the vampires as individual patients: ‘six men and a woman’, who perish ‘one by one’, can be seen to reflect an increase in cues for the attribution of experiences such as fear and pain for these characters and their ethical status as moral patients. Such opportunities for mind attribution, along with the sudden vividness of this sequentially scanned and objectively construed violence after its backgrounded presentation throughout the novel (e.g. 6g), invites readers to share in Neville’s ethical judgement of these men: 6n. They were more like gangsters than men forced into a situation. There were looks of vicious triumph on their faces, white and stark in the spotlights. Their faces were cruel and emotionless [. . .] With a sense of inward shock he could not analyse in the moment, he realized that he felt more deeply toward the vampires than he did toward their executioners. (p. 149)

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Through its manipulation of mind attribution, this altered construal invites readers to experience a similarly surprising (and hypocritical) empathy for the vampires whose murder we have been invited to witness impassively throughout.

6.8 Perspective and mind style In the closing pages of the novel, a final shift of construal delivers the impact of the twist, this time through a reversal in perspective. As Neville faces public execution, readers are confronted, alongside this character, with the rich minds of the members of this new vampire society: 6o. They all stood looking up at him with their white faces. He stared back. And suddenly he thought, I’m the abnormal one now. Normalcy was a majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just one man. Abruptly that realization joined with what he saw on their faces – awe, fear, shrinking horror – and he knew that they were afraid of him. To them he was some terrible scourge they had never seen, a scourge even worse than the disease they had come to live with. He was an invisible spectre who had left for evidence of his existence the bloodless bodies of their loved ones. And he understood what they felt and did not hate them [. . .] Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend. (p. 160) In this conclusion, Matheson alters the construal of the fictional world in a radical realignment of figure and ground. Having been invited to conceptualize the text world up to this point from the vantage point of Neville, with the standard of this ‘one man’ as the prominent subject of conception, these closing paragraphs invite readers to reconceptualize this world from the perspective of the vampires. In this new subjective construal, it is the vampires who are now prominent, and it is their lack of mind attribution for Neville (the object of conception), and resulting uncertainty and fear, that we are now invited to recognize. Coming ‘full circle’ from the opening chapter, Neville is now an unspecific, unprominent and attenuated ‘spectre’ or ‘legend’, just like the vampire myth which readers have been invited to draw upon and modify during reading. Notably, it is direct attention to the cues for mind attribution found in these characters’ faces which brings about this empathetic understanding in Neville, and which we are invited to share as readers. This ending emphasizes the ethical importance of empathizing with both Neville and the vampires in reading the text. Indeed, these two perspectives come together to create the foregrounded statement that forms both the title and closing line: ‘I am legend.’ However, by manipulating readers’ attributions of mind through the linguistic choices identified in this analysis, Matheson’s novel invites readers to overlook these other minds to some degree during reading, and to draw upon their preexisting

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expectations and fears in relation to group minds. In doing so, the novel raises the variable degree to which we attribute minds to others in our everyday lives for critical examination. Once the flawed perspective of this character is recognized, the linguistic patterns of construal throughout the text can be identified as part of a mind style for Robert Neville. The limited or inaccurate understandings of the vampires’ minds which readers are invited to enact as part of their conceptualization of the text world can be interpreted as a distinctive cognitive habit for Neville, associated with both his restricted understanding in the early parts of the novel, and his increasing need to alleviate a feeling of guilt as his understanding develops. While invited by the text, the point at which this mind style is actually attributed during reading is likely to vary between readers, whose empathetic experiences of this main character and of the novel’s concluding twist vary (Section 6.4). Unfortunately, information regarding this point of attribution cannot be obtained from the Goodreads data, in which reviewers do not typically distinguish between their experiences of the novel at different points during reading, nor between first and second readings of the text. I  would predict, however, that while some readers who are critical of Neville may recognize this mind style during a first reading of the text, for other readers the attribution of this misleading construal to Neville is likely to emerge during a second reading as part of a radically altered understanding of this character and the vampires he plagues. Setting this character mind style apart from those analysed in the previous two chapters is its creation as part of a third-person narrative with a heterodiegetic narrator (Genette 1980). While similar mind styles have been observed in previous studies, the effects of this choice of point of view (Section 2.3) for readers’ experiences of mind style has received relatively little attention. In two notable exceptions, Bockting (1995: 146–98) and Gregoriou (2003: 112–33) discuss the consequences of heterodiegetic narration for mind style and readers’ attributions of personality and moral responsibility to their texts’ main characters  – in both cases murderers. In I Am Legend, I shall argue, this point of view, and the techniques such as free indirect discourse through which Neville’s thoughts are presented, facilitate the particular kind of (uncomfortable) empathy and shifting understanding of this character described by readers of the text (Section 6.4). In terms of the CG model (see Figure  3.8; Section 3.8), this text’s construal configuration features a narrative level containing this narrator, which intervenes between readers and Neville’s focalized perspective. Notably, while narrators Offred and Kathy and their respective experiencing-selves similarly exist at different levels of the novels’ construal configurations (or in distinct embedded worlds in text world theory terms), the shared identity of both narrator and focalizer in these texts  – as different ‘enactors’ of one character (Emmott 1997; Gavins 2007)  – meant that the construal identified was attributable, at times, to both narrator and character-focalizer (see Sections 4.7 and 5.6). In these two texts, the distinction between ‘who speaks’ and ‘who sees’ (Genette 1980), or, more simply, between the construals of the two conceptualizers involved (Herman 2009a; Section 2.3), was easily blurred. As I have argued, invitations to direct attention to this intervening ground in both texts, through uses of modality, discourse markers and metafictional references to the act of

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narration, prompt alternative and sometimes contradictory attributions of the mind style observed to the rhetorical strategy of the narrator alongside the cognitive habits of the character. In I Am Legend, this intervening narrator-conceptualizer is not an older enactor of Neville, but an observer figure with omniscient access to this character’s thoughts and perceptions. Intermittent uses of his full name ‘Robert Neville’ across the narrative, such as that seen in extracts (6a), (6m), (6g) and throughout, for example, ‘Above it, on the wall, were haphazard racks of the tools that Robert Neville used’ (Matheson 2001: 8, also 12, 19, 20, 22, 30, 38, 42, etc.) serve to remind readers of this external perspective and its continuing presence alongside the intimate access to this character’s mind provided by direct thought and free indirect thought (Section 6.5). Free indirect discourse has been described as a means of combining aspects of the voices or perspectives of a narrator and character, through its ‘mixings or mergings of narratorial indirectness with characterological directness’ (Toolan 2001: 131; see also Pascal 1977). Drawing on this ‘dual-voice’ hypothesis, use of this technique – evident across the extracts analysed in this chapter in the combination of the past tense, thirdperson form of the narrator, with the proximal deixis, modality, exclamations and mind style of Neville – can therefore be seen to combine both perspectives throughout the narrative. In discussions of free indirect discourse, this combination of perspectives is often said to result in an experience of empathy or irony towards the character presented (Oltean 1993; Toolan 2001; Sotirova 2006; Bray 2007). For Oltean (1993:  708), alongside the empathetic effect of internal access to the character’s perspective, an ironic effect arises from the ‘double significance produced by the contrast of values associated with two positions’. Such experiences have relevance for I Am Legend, in which specific instances of free indirect thought, such as that describing Neville’s implicitly sexist perception of housekeeping, might plausibly be seen to invite either interpretation: ‘For he was a man and he was alone and these things had no importance to him’ (Matheson 2001: 9). In Section 3.8, reader engagement with fictional minds was modelled in terms of the graded prominence of a subject and object of construal. Modelled in CG terms, the ‘dual-voice’ effect of free indirect discourse might be understood as involving a degree of attention to both of these conceptualizers and the narrative levels at which they are grounded as part of the conceptualization of a fictional world. This attentional processing cued by free indirect discourse is represented in Figure 6.1. While the detailed and prominent depiction of Neville’s perceptions, thoughts and feelings invites an objective construal of his experiences as part of a close empathetic engagement, the external narrative point of view foregrounded through use of his proper name foregrounds the heterodiegetic narrator, directing attention to this subject of conception, and its potentially contrasting values, in a subjective construal (see also Tabakowska 2014). By combining the two, free indirect discourse might be said to invite a rapid shifting, or distribution of attention, between these two perspectives, in a dual-construal effect (represented by the double-sided arrow in Figure 6.1). In this way, CG provides a psychologically plausible account of the ‘double significance’ (Oltean 1997) responsible for free indirect discourse’s empathetic and ironic effects.

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Figure 6.1. Multiple conceptualizers in free indirect discourse.

Though facilitated by stylistic choices, these experiences are ultimately dependent on the reader (Bray 2007:  59; see also Fludernik 1993:  354–6). In a CG account, this can be specified in terms of readers’ directing of attention to these conceptualizers according to their knowledge, motivations and dispositions. Through the use of this technique, Matheson might be seen to provide readers with the opportunity to position themselves variably in relation to Neville and his mind style, as part of an empathetic alignment, ironic distancing, or combination of the two, during their conceptualization of the text world. For those readers who empathize with Neville during reading, the sudden shift of perspective in the novel’s conclusion, and invitation to view Neville from the vampires’ vantage point, may come as a shock, provoking a rapid reevaluation of Neville’s actions. While readers will vary in their experience of this altered perspective as a sudden shift, or gradual process of realization over the course of the text (Section 6.4), the general movement from an objective to a subjective construal of Neville, or from a ‘close’ to a ‘distanced’ engagement with this character mind (Section 3.8), is one which is arguably facilitated through the narrative point of view and, in particular, the dual-construal effect of free indirect discourse. As in The Handmaid’s Tale, the increased attention to the other minds at this text’s various narrative levels (including, here, the other characters in the text world itself) invite an increased sense of distance, and a dramatically different experience of the characters, during subsequent readings of the text.

6.9 Conclusion This chapter started out by discussing the cumulative effects of transitivity choices for mind style. By reanalysing these patterns using CG, this chapter has identified

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the conceptual basis for the interpretative effects proposed in previous accounts, while identifying further linguistic choices which contribute in I Am Legend. As was described in Section 3.8, a cognitive stylistic approach calls for greater attention to the experiential significance of the processes and participant roles identified in systemicfunctional grammar as part of the conceptualization of a text world (Gavins 2007: 64). As demonstrated here, a CG analysis of event construal in terms of action chains can move beyond systemic-functional grammar by explaining the consequences of transitivity choices for impressions of agency, intention and blame. At a basic level, I have argued, such interpretative effects and the linguistic choices that prompt them are a matter of mind attribution, or our recognition of mental states such as motivation and desire (e.g. in agents) and feelings such as pleasure or suffering (e.g. in patients). This CG approach to transitivity, I would argue, has much to offer not just for analyses of mind style, but also for analyses of worldview and ideology in discourse more broadly, in stylistics and critical discourse analysis. Leading on from previous analyses of mind style (Bockting 1994; Semino 2014), this chapter has explored a mind style characterized by problems with mind attribution, and has shown how readers enact this cognitive habit during their reading of the text. It has demonstrated an integrated analysis of characterization which combines both an ‘internalist’ and ‘externalist’ perspective on fictional minds (Palmer 2010), or one which accounts for the combined contribution of mind style, thought representation, descriptions of action and intermentality to readers’ empathetic and ethical experiences of characters. As this analysis has demonstrated, research into mind attribution in social psychology offers a valuable source of insights for cognitive stylistic analysis, which is directly compatible with CG’s embodied account of construal in terms of selective attention. While discussions of Theory of Mind are increasingly common in stylistics and narratology, this analysis is the first to draw upon research into the causes and consequences of this processing, as opposed to the debated mechanisms involved in the processing itself. By drawing on the links between language and embodied cognition outlined by CG, this field of research can be seen to offer new insights into the impressions we form of other people based on their linguistic representation.

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7.1 Introduction As the analyses so far have shown, any type of linguistic choice can contribute to the experience of a mind style in narrative. The final type of linguistic choice that I focus on here is figurative language, specifically: metaphor and simile. Like the accounts of lexis and schematic knowledge discussed in Chapter 5, the role of metaphorical patterns in the creation of mind styles has been previously considered from a cognitive stylistic perspective, drawing on conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff and Turner 1989) and conceptual integration (or blending) theory (Fauconnier and Turner 2002). Building on this previous work, I argue that a CG-informed approach can help to explain the stylistic effects of such creative uses of metaphor. This includes the felt experience of a mind style, through an enactment, or mental simulation, of the processing habits that metaphors represent. I explore this argument through an analysis of The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard (1962), a text often described by readers as particularly immersive through the ‘vivid’ imagery used to depict its fictional environment and the mind of its third-person focalizer. Once again applying Langacker’s model of construal, alongside cognitive linguistic work by Talmy (2000a, 2000b) on fictive motion and force dynamics, I explore how the creative uses of metaphor in this novel invite readers to enact a distinctive mind style. In doing so, I explore the linguistic manipulation of mental simulation, and the bigger questions this raises for mind style and stylistics more broadly.

7.2 Conventional and idiosyncratic metaphors In the cognitive linguistic approach to metaphor known as conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff and Turner 1989), metaphorical expressions in language are understood to be reflective of a basic cognitive process through which we make sense of our experiences. This process is defined as ‘a cross-domain mapping in the conceptual system’ (Lakoff 1993:  203) or a mapping of knowledge from one, typically concrete and familiar domain of experience (the source domain), onto another more abstract, or less familiar domain (the target domain). Since the 1980s, the nature of this mapping and its contribution to habitual and creative reasoning has been one of the richest areas of research in cognitive linguistics.

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Building on work by Black (1993) which reconsidered personification in The Inheritors in these terms, Semino and Swindlehurst (1996) explored patterns of metaphors in Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The following extract describes the lead nurse (or ‘The Big Nurse’) of the psychiatric hospital in which the first-person narrator Bromden is committed, and is one of many extracts that Semino and Swindlehurst analyse across the novel. Her nostrils flare open, and every breath she draws she gets bigger [. . .] She works the hinges in her elbows and fingers. I hear a small squeak. She starts moving, and I get back against the wall, and when she rumbles past she’s already big as a truck, trailing that wicker bag behind her in her exhaust like a semi behind a Jimmy Diesel. Her lips are parted, and her smile’s going out before her like a radiator grill. I can smell the hot oil and magneto spark when she goes past, and every step hits the floor she blows up a size bigger, blowing and puffing, roll down anything in her path. (Kesey 1973: 79)

This quotation demonstrates some of the linguistic realizations of a conceptual metaphor identified throughout the narrative:  MINDS/PEOPLE ARE MACHINES. This conceptual metaphor, and its mapping of our knowledge of MACHINES (source) onto PEOPLE (target), is one that is conventional in English according to Semino and Swindlehurst (also Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 27; Lakoff and Turner 1989: 132) since it manifests in common expressions such as I’m not functioning properly today, I’m running out of steam (or indeed, the many references to ‘mental functioning’ and ‘cognitive mechanisms’ found throughout this book!). In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, they observe, Bromden’s narrative develops, or creatively extends (Lakoff and Turner 1989) this conventional metaphor though a range of linguistic forms, including both metaphorical expressions ‘she works the hinges in her elbows and fingers’ and similes ‘her smile’s going out before her like a radiator grill’. Frequent and creative manifestations of this conceptual metaphor throughout the novel are said to reveal a distinctive cognitive habit for this narrator: a tendency to understand people and situations in terms of machinery to an extent which is deviant and foregrounded. For Semino and Swindlehurst, Bromden’s use of metaphor and similes, and his alternation between them, suggests that Bromden confuses the distinction between the literal and metaphorical as part of a paranoid view of reality: ‘he seems to believe that people, for example, really are machines’ (1996: 152). Given his former work as a mechanic and the World War II air raid which preceded his mental breakdown1 and hospitalization, this habit seems to be a distinctive feature of his individual mind style. While Semino and Swindlehurst (1996) (also Black 1993) explored the creation of a mind style through frequent and creative extensions of conventional conceptual metaphors, subsequent work by Semino (2002, 2006a) has analysed the contribution of novel, idiosyncratic metaphors to the mind styles of characters. In Fowles’s The Collector, for example, the main character Clegg is shown to conceptualize his victim Miranda in terms of an original BUTTERFLY source domain, which does not have any clear conventional basis (Semino 2002). While conceptual metaphor theory again

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offers a means of identifying patterns in this character’s idiosyncratic cognitive habits, conceptual integration (Fauconnier and Turner 2002) is said to better explain the complex multidirectional mapping of domains (or in this theory, ‘mental spaces’) involved our online processing of instantiations of this metaphor during reading. Both theories, it is argued, are ‘compatible and complementary’ in their approach to metaphor (Semino 2002: 119). However, while effectively modelling conceptual creativity in terms of the types of mappings, or connections between mental spaces, represented by linguistic metaphors, neither theory fully accounts for the stylistic effects of the linguistic choices employed in this representation, or ‘the linguistic dimension of creativity’ (Semino 2008: 52; see also Browse 2014). Developing previous work in this area, in the following section I explore how the dimensions of construal might be applied to metaphor and its use in discourse. A second, related question for cognitive stylistics concerns the experiential quality of metaphors, or their felt effects on readers. In this respect, both Black (1993) and Semino and Swindlehurst (1996) note that it is a foundation in the conventional metaphors of English that makes the mind styles of Lok and Bromden respectively at once strikingly deviant and accessible, or to some extent familiar. Taking this further, Black also notes the effects of metaphor in The Inheritors as creating a ‘sensuous richness’, but adds that her present concern is with the contribution of metaphor to the ‘meaning of the novel’ (1993: 37). It is these other experiential concerns beyond meaning that CG is particularly well placed to address. Browse (2014) makes a similar argument with regard to metaphor. In a microanalysis of one simile from Never Let Me Go, Browse (2014: 82) argues that ‘there is more to metaphor than mapping’ and that the felt quality, or ‘texture’ (Stockwell 2009), of metaphors merits closer attention using CG. In the following section I build on Browse’s suggestions, drawing on wider research in cognitive linguistics to inform a CG discussion of metaphor with regard to mind style.

7.3 Metaphor and simulation in cognitive grammar In CG, metaphor is one of a number of ways in which we conceptualize fictive content. Metaphor (and indeed all of grammar) involves taking the mental operations involved in one area of experience and applying them to another set of circumstances (see Section 3.5). In its description of the cognitive processing underpinning metaphor, CG draws upon cognitive semantic theories of conceptual metaphor and conceptual integration. For Langacker (2008:  51) the ‘domains’ and ‘mental spaces’ described by these two approaches are referentially equivalent, and equally generalizable, though differing usefully in application and focus. CG describes the construal underpinning a metaphorical expression just like any other kind of expression – as content profiled against a network of domains. For metaphors, this domain matrix includes a source domain, a target domain, and a creative ‘hybrid domain’, or blended conception, which is constructed based on ‘connections’ between these ‘inputs’, and which inherits selected

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features of both. In CG, this mapping of content is a special case of the integration of domain content involved in semantic composition more broadly (Section 3.3). In processing linguistic constructions in this way, we can compose meanings that are familiar (e.g. busy nurse), novel but possible (purple nurse), or imaginary and metaphorical (robotic nurse) (Langacker 2008: 528). The content activated and shared across source and target domains can therefore be discussed in terms of focusing, as with any kind of construal (Section 3.4). As was discussed in Chapter 5, the knowledge focused by an expression is structured in terms of figure and ground, or a graded cline of foreground and background. Applying this to metaphor, Langacker (2008:  58) describes the prototypical relationship between domains in terms of attention: The source domain provides a conceptual background in terms of which the target domain is viewed and understood. Viewing the target against this background results in a hybrid domain, or blended space [. . .]. We can also say, with equal validity, that the source and target domains jointly constitute the background from which the blended conception emerges. Not only does the blend inherit selected features of both the source and target, but it is also foregrounded in the sense of being most directly coded linguistically.

Following this model, our processing of a metaphorical expression ‘she works the hinges in her elbows and fingers’ involves a cline of attention from the source domain (MACHINES) in the background, to the target of PEOPLE, and finally, to a resulting blended conception of what the expression describes in the foreground: a woman with joints that move like hinges. This domain matrix is represented in Figure 7.1. The foregrounded conception of meaning exists at the level of the text world, and feeds into our developing mental representation of the discourse (see Gavins 2007: chapter 9). Since our composition of meaning for any expression in CG involves

Figure 7.1. Focusing of domains for a metaphorical expression (adapted from Langacker 2008: 57).

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the focusing of multiple domains, this model also accommodates a literal interpretation of this expression as part of a developing text world (e.g. the conceptualization of a semimechanical woman with transplanted hinges in place of elbows and knuckles). This raises questions as to the interaction between such literal and metaphorical understandings during online processing. Psycholinguistic research suggests direct access to a metaphorical interpretation for conventional metaphors, but a potential involvement of literal meaning for novel metaphors (see Sanford and Emmott 2012: 61–4 for a review). As we shall see in the analysis in this chapter, the question of whether literal or metaphorical meanings are composed for expressions in texts can hold significance for our interpretation of a mind style. Metaphorical expressions, then, represent instances of construal. Viewed in this way, the different dimensions of construal offer a means of distinguishing forms of linguistic creativity with regard to metaphor, building on the accounts of conceptual creativity described terms of conceptual metaphor and conceptual integration. In Lakoff and Turner’s original work on this subject, creativity at the conceptual level of metaphor is described in terms of combination, extension and elaboration (1989: 67; see also Kövesces 2000: 43–53; Semino 2008: 44–9). The combination of conceptual metaphors is, for Lakoff and Turner (1989: 71), a powerful means of creating ‘a richer and more complex set of metaphorical connections’. Sticking with the earlier example from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the PEOPLE ARE MACHINES metaphor is combined with another conventional metaphor POWERFUL IS BIG (‘she’s already big as a truck’; ‘she blows up a size bigger’). By focusing a complex matrix of domains, the text can be seen to create a richer set of inferences in the blend than either could alone. Extension, in Lakoff and Turner’s (1989) account, involves mapping, or blending, new elements between the source and target domains. For example, while it is conventional to talk about people in terms of machines, the comparison of a ‘radiator grill’ and a ‘smile’ in Kesey’s novel, is highly original. In terms of construal, we can say that such expressions profile new entities in attention within the source domain, and so invite new connections with elements of the target domain. Elaboration, finally, involves construing existing elements of the source domain in unusual or unconventional ways. Sanford and Emmott (2012: 66) give the example of ‘The pain catches him under the arms swiftly and silently, like his own father lifting him from behind’ (Leland 1983:  91). While it is conventional to talk of pain as an external agent, the construal of this agent as the man’s father seems to draw upon a more specific scenario as its source domain than would be normally seen. While extending a conventional metaphor pertains to choices in terms of what is profiled within the source domain focused by a construal, elaborating typically involves construing the source domain with a different level of specificity, prominence or dynamicity than is normally the case (see Browse 2014 for detailed analysis of a complex metaphorical elaboration in Never Let Me Go). A systematic examination of metaphorical creativity along these dimensions, and their effects, represents one way in which a CG account of metaphor may contribute to existing work in this field. Another important concept for the discussion of metaphor in CG, and in cognitive linguistics more broadly, is that of mental simulation (Section 3.5). Metaphor in cognitive linguistics represents a basic means through which we ground our understanding

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of abstract conceptions such as LIFE, TIME and LOVE, in terms of recurring patterns of bodily experience such as MOTION and HUNGER (Gibbs et  al. 2004). Research in the cognitive sciences has suggested that this grounding exists in the form of a simulation of embodied experiences (Barsalou 1999; Zwaan 2004). The discovery of a ‘mirror neuron system’ in the brain shows that parts of our brains increase their rate of firing whether an action is performed, or simply observed (Gallese et al. 1996; Rizzolatti and Craighero 2004). Significantly, this appears to include not only direct observations, but also representations using language (Aziz-Zadeh et al. 2006). Action verbs such as ‘kick’ and ‘bite’ have been shown to activate areas of the motor cortex associated with movement of the body parts involved (Hauk et al. 2004), while, comprehension of a sentence describing movement in a particular direction (e.g. ‘open the drawer’) creates difficulty for participants carrying out movements in the opposite direction (e.g. reaching forward to push a button) (Glenberg and Kaschak 2002; Zwaan and Taylor 2006). In a study by Bargh, Chen and Burrows (1996) participants primed with words relating to the ELDERLY stereotype (e.g. ‘grey’, ‘bingo’, etc.) walked more slowly from the experiment room than those who weren’t. Similar embodied effects for linguistic stimuli have been found not just for movement, but also for other sensory experiences including visibility (Keysers et al. 2004) and touch (Yaxley and Zwaan 2007). Notably, such physical effects for sentence comprehension are seen not only for literal descriptions, but also figurative ones. With regard to motion, the same embodied effects are seen for descriptions of movement by abstract entities, such as a transfer of information: ‘Liz told you the story’ (Glenberg and Kaschak 2002) and the fictive motion of static entities, for example, ‘the road runs along the coast’ (Matlock 2004; Richardson and Matlock 2007). These studies suggest that ‘the mental simulation of motion occurs not just in literal thought and language about motion, but in figurative thought and language about motion as well’ (Matlock 2004: 1396). In light of accumulating evidence for embodied responses to literal and figurative language, a question for cognitive stylistics concerns the way in which readers’ simulations may be manipulated by the linguistic choices of writers. As described in Section 3.5, the concept of mental simulation is often drawn upon in cognitive stylistics as a means of discussing readers’ experiences of immersion in worlds and empathy for characters, however, the specific ways in which writers can manipulate simulation is yet to be satisfactorily explained (Dancygier 2014: 226). As Sanford and Emmott (2012: 150–59) observe, unanswered questions in embodiment research raise questions for its application to narrative. These include:  the working of simulations during comprehension in real time, including their level of detail and duration during processing; the extent to which they are consciously experienced by readers; and the extent to which they are necessary for comprehension, or an ‘enriching optional extra’ (Sanford and Emmott 2012: 133; see also Zwaan and Taylor 2006). With regard to this final question, Sanford and Emmott adopt the latter point of view and suggest that, while a significant aspect of comprehension, such ‘embodiment effects’ may be cued to varying degrees during comprehension, and may be enhanced or amplified by the linguistic choices of a speaker or writer (2012: 268). The linguistic cues responsible for this enhancement are still under investigation. Drawing on early findings in the cognitive sciences, descriptions of bodily or sensory

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responses, such as movement, forceful actions, perceptions, feelings and emotions are viewed as potential cues for mental simulations in narrative, with the qualification that these be ‘contextually framed’ relative to a specific human-scale perspective (Sanford and Emmott 2012:  156), or aligned with ‘an experiencing subjectivity’ (Dangygier 2014: 216). Exploiting the processes involved in visual perception in description, such as the gestalt principles of figure and ground or our sequential scanning of events, is also said to contribute to a vivid, or intense simulation of perception, for example, of a scene (Rice 2012; Yuan 2014) or a character’s face (Jajdelska et al. 2010). As a starting point, CG offers a basis for discussion of the linguistic manipulation of simulations in terms of the degree of attenuation invited though a linguistic construal. As described in Section 3.5, CG views mental simulation as a basic component of grammar and meaning; all linguistic expressions involve a simulation to some extent. Attenuation is described as a degree of awareness of the visual, auditory, tactile and motor processing activated during language processing (see also Sanford and Emmott 2012: 158). For example, the quantifier each evokes a simulated sequential examination of multiple entities, which readers are unlikely to be aware of. By comparison, a sentence such as There’s a house every now and then through the valley is said to evoke a fictive TRAVEL domain, or simulated sequential examination of scenes along a spatial path, which is more vividly experienced (Langacker 2008: 537). In CG terms these two expressions differ with regard to the extent to which their underlying dynamic content is objectively and subjectively construed. Each profiles little tangible content – the act of comparison it focuses is highly abstracted, and is therefore subjective. On the other hand, There’s a house every now and then through the valley presents a more objective construal of a conceivable situation, in which a human participant, or mover, travels through a valley and watches the scenery. In Sanford and Emmott’s (2012) terms the two examples differ in terms of the extent to which the simulated experience (here of scanning of a situation through time) is situated relative to a specific human-scale (spatial, temporal and psychological) perspective. Writers, then, may attenuate simulations through subjective construal, reducing attention to the processes involved in its experience. In the case of There’s a house every now and then through the valley, a writer might decide to subjectively construe this content by placing the movement and perception of the viewer within the ground, as in (a) below, and so attenuate its simulation. Alternatively, a writer might construe it even more objectively by placing these processes onstage, as in (b) and so have the opposite effect – enriching its mental simulation, or making its conceptualization more vivid. a. The Ribble Valley had few houses. b. Through the window, the man saw a small grey farmhouse every now and then as the train sped through the valley. The experience of the resulting simulation reflects the extent to which we are aware of our dynamic mental representation of the movement and perception described. Analyses in the previous chapters have suggested how attenuation of a simulation might result in a depiction of a particular kind of cognitive habit as part of a mind style. Vivid, but restricted simulations of visual perception in The Handmaid’s Tale,

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were seen to result in a sense of Offred’s ‘gasped’ perceptions and thoughts. Meanwhile, attenuated simulations of emotional situations in Never Let Me Go were said to invite a sense of Kathy’s questionable humanity as a clone. Finally, attenuated simulations of the actions of the vampires in I Am Legend, it was argued, result in a reduced attribution of mental states, reflective of that of Robert Neville. The strategic attenuation of simulations in a narrative, therefore, is one way in which writers invite readers to enact mind styles. Since rich, intense experiences of real life are the cognitive ‘norm’ against which fictional representations are experienced by readers, it makes sense that one technique for defamiliarization, or presenting a distinctive mind style, is to reduce this normative embodied element. While Sanford and Emmott (2012) view embodied effects as ‘enriching’ readers’ conceptualizations of situations, my analyses suggest that the absence of embodied effects may be as enriching for our interpretation as their presence, by making the familiar unfamiliar. Departing from these previous analyses, the text I consider here appears to trigger extremely vivid simulations of experience in readers as part of the impression of a distinctive mind. I explore the patterns in its use of metaphor which contribute to these effects, and their possible contribution to a mind style.

7.4 J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World The Drowned World, published in 1962, is the second novel of British writer J. G. Ballard and the first of three apocalyptic novels, followed by The Drought (1965) and The Crystal World (1966). In an essay originally published in the same year, J. G. Ballard declares the decline of traditional science fiction, and the turn to ‘inner space’ or the internal world of consciousness in its place: ‘The biggest developments of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored. The only truly alien planet is Earth’ (1996 [1962]: 197). Ballard’s notion of ‘inner space’ is strongly associated with the exploration of the unconscious mind in the Surrealist art movement, described by Ballard as ‘the iconography of inner space’ through its ‘fusion of the outer world of reality and the inner world of the psyche’ (1996:  84–7). Like the landscapes depicted in surrealist paintings, the alternative worlds presented in speculative fiction, Ballard argues, should be interpreted as reflective of unconscious mental states. The novel describes a future version of Earth, set in 2145, in which solar flares followed by a succession of climate changes have caused the polar ice caps to melt and sea levels to rise, submerging much of the Earth underwater. The third-person narrative follows the activities of Dr.  Richard Kerans, the sole focalizer, who is a member of a party of scientists and soldiers responsible for surveying this new landscape and sending information back to what is left of civilization, now camped in Greenland. We see Kerans’ movements around a recognizable twentieth-century city (later revealed to be London) swamped by lagoons, jungles and giant lizards, and learn of the psychological effects that this environment has had on him and the few other individuals still living there. Rather than expressing fear at the evident threats of the

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rising temperatures and increasingly aggressive reptile inhabitants, Kerans describes a calmness and developing introspection. He regards this withdrawal as ‘symptomatic not of a dormant schizophrenia, but of a careful preparation for a radically new environment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would merely be an encumbrance’ (Ballard 2012: 14). From this perspective, and its passive acceptance that ‘little now remained to be done’, the efforts of Kerans’ colleagues to scientifically analyse this new world and report back to Greenland is a ‘pointless game’ (p. 8), or an attempt to pursue a way of life which is obviously a thing of the past. The new ‘logic’, however, seems increasingly irrational, as Kerans and another character Beatrice show a reluctance to leave, or even to protect themselves against the weather, disease and iguanas which will inevitably kill them (pp.  26, 48). These ‘self-destructive impulses’ (p.  27) are accompanied by a ‘logical’ lack of concern for others: ‘Logically – for what had a more gloomy prognosis than life? – every morning one should say to one’s friends: “I grieve for your irrevocable death”’ (p. 72). In the course of the novel, Kerans experiences increasingly frequent nightmares which seem to seep into his days in the form of hallucinations:  ‘Like an endless shallows, the residues of the dreams stretched away below the surface of the reality around him’ (p.  114). His increasingly tenuous grip on reality coincides with an obsession with travelling south, where the heat is greatest, and which is ‘both forbidding and inviting’ (p.  70) though clearly suicidal. At the end of the novel, Kerans encounters another character ‘Hardman’ along this path, almost dead and blinded by corneal cancers from his obsessive journey towards the sun, before continuing on this same path regardless (p. 171). A common response to The Drowned World among literary critics is discussion of the vivid, imagistic and surreal nature of the world it invites us to conceptualize. For example, Greenland (2012: 92) describes Ballard’s apocalyptic novels as ‘pictorial’, containing ‘prominent image[s]’ and ‘figures in a landscape strangely lit’, while Baxter describes The Drowned World as the ‘most painterly’ of his whole collection (2009: 17). Another recurrent theme is a sense of ‘unease’ or uncertain emotional and ethical response prompted in readers of this text, and Ballard’s work more broadly (e.g. Luckhurst 1997; Gąsiorek 2005). Luckhurst (1997: xii) describes ‘the unease felt when reading the body of work produced by J.  G. Ballard, a corpus compelling to some, repelling to others, yet always provocative for both constituencies’. In accounting for this impact, critics highlight Ballard’s detached or ‘deliberately “cold” viewpoint’ (Gąsiorek 2005: 13) and its lack of moral and emotional engagement with the characters, along with the characters’ submissiveness and lack of interest in one another (Greenland 2012: 96–7). Finally, critics highlight the conflicting ethical interpretations of Ballard’s narratives, which seem to caution readers with nightmare futures, while insisting ‘that they may, despite appearances and ethical considerations, be beneficial and liberatory’ (Gąsiorek 2005: 23). For Wendland (1985: 149), ‘the crux of the issue for this book is how a reader judges [Kerans’] behavior’. The range of responses to Ballard’s early apocalyptic texts in literary criticism reflect this interpretative complication. Some critics express an extremely negative interpretation of the novel as self-indulgent death worship (e.g. Franklin 1979). At

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the same time, in other accounts, Kerans’ state of mind and his psychological journey is said to lead to ‘psychic wholeness’ (Brigg 1985:  46), or a ‘repossession for man of an authentic and absolute being’ (Stephenson 1985:  38). Others report a mixed response; for example, Self describes ‘the skull beneath the skin of civilised humanity’, which we are exposed to, as ‘a psychological phenomenon at once disconcerting and oddly heartening’ (Self 2013). Finally, some critics describe this immersive reading experience as one which is in some way ‘seductive’. For Baxter (2009), ‘Ballard’s prose poetry is undeniably seductive, but these carefully crafted, hypnotic narrative textures should be resisted by the reader’ (2009:  56). Wendland expresses a similar concern regarding the alternative mindset presented, as an invitation for readers to share in the characters’ suicidal attitudes. What readers are left with, according to Wendland, is ‘a haunting suspicion that the novel has tried to convince us of the worth of such “irrational” behaviour’ (1985: 147).2 For critics, then, this text calls upon readers to suspend their normal judgement, and accept a new logic as part of an immersive experience of its vivid fictional world. Following this view, the varied reader experiences of Ballard’s novel, and the discomfort it produces for some, might be seen as reflecting its variable success in engaging (or seducing) readers into this alternative mindset.

Reader responses to the novel on Goodreads In order to test these predictions and explore responses among a wider group of readers, I collected a sample of the hundred most recent reviews of The Drowned World from Goodreads (2015f; this dataset referenced throughout as GR-4). Like the literary critics, readers recognize the distinctive mindset through which we perceive the fictional world of this novel, for example commenting that: ‘The plot and characters are almost beside the point; this is more a lavishly described state of mind’ (R54, GR-4). In addition, many readers comment upon their vivid experience of imagery for the environment described: His books have the same opaqueness and watercolour imagery of dreams. This book is the same; another vivid dystopia with an unsettling madness to the world it is set within. (R27, GR-4) The world of this book is quite vividly described, the image of the drowned cities is quite evocative, and the drained city even more so. There is an odd kind of beauty to it. (R45, GR-4) I must admit these descriptive passages are very evocative  – painting a vivid picture of the heat, humidity and destruction. (R79, GR-4)

In their discussions of this imagery, readers also describe the immersiveness of this reading experience, and interestingly, do so using words such as ‘delirious’ (R30, GR-4) and ‘trippy’ (R26, GR-4). The adjective ‘hallucinatory’ is used by five different reviewers in my sample of responses and references to ‘dream[s/y/like]’ occur in eleven of the reviews. The reviews below exemplify the contexts in which such words occur:

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A very drifting, dreamy, hallucinatory sort of book  – at least for the first half. I  really should have read this outdoors in the summer time to get the steamy, humid feeling of the swamps rather than during fall. Today’s chilly breeze didn’t fit well with the 110+ F setting of the book! (R82, GR-4) Ballard’s description of this hot and sticky environment is beautifully vivid and appears to play homage to a lot of the lush literature that Joseph Conrad wrote in The Heart Of Darkness. It’s a dream like state of awe that you’re pulled into when you read The Drowned World, and one that’s difficult to find your way out of. (R78, GR-4) If you’re looking for a book to make you lose touch with reality this is it. I love that it was published in 1962 and still holds it’s own as a fevered, imaginative dystopian work. (R97, GR-4) There is something about this book, and the density of the writing that gives such a feeling of heat and humidity, and just made my brain sluggish. (R50, GR-4)

For many readers in my sample, the immersive experience of this fictional world has a distinctive embodied quality. Another reader states: ‘I read this when I was on submarine duty in the Atlantic, as I did most of the authors books. I always felt on finishing each book that I would fail the next drug screening test even though I had not tamed any’ (R95, GR-4). However, like the literary criticism described earlier, responses to the novel are often mixed, as readers qualify their praise for the vivid prose and its imagery, with a discussion of their difficulties in engaging with the plot and empathizing with the characters, including its focalizer, Kerans. The plot pacing made little to no sense, and in the end I  have no idea who any of these people are or what their stories are, nor do I  care. In short, this would be a painful novel to read if it were not for Ballard’s knack for painting a world of despair and decay that does manage to take hold on the readers mind. (R53, GR-4) Beautiful, eerie depictions, wonderful imagination, but slightly odd dialogue, and even odder actions taken by several characters. Not sure what to make of The Drowned World. I was certainly immersed in the novel [. . .] In terms of reader empathy, how can we empathise with a person in such a situation? It’s hard not to be rather detached from the process. (R3, GR-4) I am all for trippy, dreamy examinations of the human psyche and its reaction to a doomed world. What grated were the constant evolutionary explanations for the fatalistic (or, to be more blunt, suicidal) attitudes of the protagonists. (R26, GR-4) Most of the characters have no drive to survive, so they’re not that sympathetic or relatable, nor do they have some sort of firm purpose to give the main narrative momentum. The rest of the characters are complete clichés (Colonel Riggs) or

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cartoon villains (Strangman, a knock-off Kurtz with an alligator fetish and a painfully on-the-nose name), so it’s not easy to care about what happens to any of these characters. It’s made even harder by the fact that they do things that don’t make any sense. (R22, GR-4)

In such reviews, difficulty in understanding the motivations of the characters is often described alongside a wider lack of plot or pace in the novel, or as directly responsible for it (e.g. R22, GR-4). These responses lend support to Palmer’s (2004) claims for the centrality of fictional minds to the recognition of plot in narrative (see Section 6.3). Applying the framework developed in the previous chapter, such responses could be further investigated and accounted for in terms of the cues for mind attribution presented for these characters, and their consequences for empathy. In the following analysis, my focus is upon the embodied effects of this text, and attribution to a distinctive ‘state of mind’ for its character-focalizer. Central to the vivid imagery and immersive quality of this fictional world, I shall argue, is Ballard’s use of figurative language, and the vivid mental simulations it invites. Drawing on the CG approach discussed in the previous chapter, I begin to explore the ways in which such experiences can be analysed and accounted for linguistically as part of a mind style.

7.5 Figurative language in The Drowned World The opening of Ballard’s novel introduces us to the apocalyptic world in which it is situated and the global warming which caused it. The following extract is the novel’s opening paragraph: 7a. Soon it would be too hot. Looking out from the hotel balcony shortly after eight o-clock, Kerans watched the sun rise behind the dense groves of giant gymnosperms crowding over the roofs of the abandoned department stores four hundred yards away on the east side of the lagoon. Even through the massive olive-green fronds the relentless power of the sun was plainly tangible. The blunt refracted rays drummed against his bare chest and shoulders, drawing out the first sweat, and he put on a pair of heavy sunglasses to protect his eyes. The solar disc was no longer a well-defined sphere, but a wide expanding ellipse that fanned out across the eastern horizon like a colossal fire-ball, its reflection turning the dead leaden surface of the lagoon into a brilliant copper shield. By noon, less than four hours away, the water would seem to burn. (Ballard 2012: 7) A number of features of the linguistic construal of this world are noticeable here. There is a density of descriptive adjectives (e.g. ‘dense’, ‘giant’, ‘massive’, ‘hot’, ‘heavy’, ‘blunt’, ‘colossal’, ‘clear’, ‘brilliant’), which describe entities as large, bright and weighty and could be described as prominent figural ‘attractors’ of attention in Stockwell’s (2009) model. Another important source of prominence in CG is agency and action, and again this passage is full of it. Gymnosperms (plants) are ‘crowding over the roofs’, sunbeams

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‘drum’ against his chest, ‘drawing out’ sweat, while the sun is ‘a fire-ball’, ‘power[ful]’, ‘expanding’, ‘fanned out’, ‘turning’, and the water seems to ‘burn’. Aside from the rising sun and the character’s action of putting on sunglasses, all of this motion is nonliteral, or figurative – it describes what are actually static entities. This fictive motion includes the path implicit in the spatial prepositions which describe acts of perception such as ‘Looking out from the hotel balcony’ and ‘through the massive olive-green fronds’. These patterns exemplify wider tendencies in the linguistic construal of this world across the novel as a whole. Extracts (7b) and (7c), from later points in the novel, allow these patterns to be examined in more detail. Here, highlighting in bold indicates further instances of fictive motion: 7b. At the end of the creek they entered the next lagoon, a wide circle of dark green water almost half a mile in diameter. A lane of plastic red buoys marked a channel towards an opening on the far side. The cutter had a draught of little more than a foot, and as they moved along through the flat water, the sun slanting down behind them opening up the submerged depths, they could see the clear outlines of five- and six-storey buildings looming like giant ghosts, here and there a moss-covered roof breaking the surface as the swell rolled past it. [. . .] The brick houses and single-storey factories of the suburbs had disappeared completely below the drifting tides of silt. Where these broke surface giant forests reared up into the burning dull-green sky, smothering the former wheatfields of temperate Europe and North America. (pp. 18–19) 7c. Descending to three hundred feet above the water, they began to rake up and down the distal five-mile length of the main channel. The huge banks of silt lifted above the surface like the backs of yellow sperm whales. Wherever the hydrodynamic contours of the channel gave the silt banks any degree of permanence, the surrounding jungle spilled from the rooftops and rooted itself in the damp loam, matting the whole morass into an immovable structure. From the hatchway Kerans scrutinised the narrow beaches under the outer edge of the fern trees, watching for the telltale signs of a camouflaged raft or makeshift hut. (p. 58) In cognitive linguistics, fictive motion is identified as a conventional feature of everyday language use (Talmy 2000a). Talmy identifies a number of categories of fictive motion, the most common of which is the co-extension path, defined as ‘a depiction of the form, orientation, or location of a spatially extended object in terms of a path over the object’s extent’ (2000a:  138). In extract (7b), the sentence ‘A lane of plastic red buoys marked a channel towards an opening on the far side’ represents such a path, since the buoys are literally static, but described metaphorically using a motion verb ‘marked’ and preposition ‘towards’. Other instances in these extracts exemplify a range of other fictive motion paths. These include emanation paths, which describe the fictive downwards movement of an intangible entity, in this case, the sun’s light (‘The blunt refracted rays drummed against his bare chest and shoulders’ [7b], ‘the sun slanting down behind them’ [7c]). Also frequent are advent paths, describing the location of stationary entities such as buildings and forests in terms of their arrival onsite, or

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manifestation in perception (e.g. ‘giant gymnosperms crowding over the roofs’ [7b], ‘a moss-covered roof breaking the surface’ [7c], ‘The huge banks of silt lifted above the surface’ [7c]). In terms of conceptual metaphor theory, examples of fictive motion reflect a conventional conceptual metaphor FORM IS MOTION (Lakoff and Turner 1989:  142). Given our tendency to talk of spatially situated entities in terms of movement (Talmy 2000a), many of the individual descriptions seen in these extracts may seem natural or unsurprising. What makes this use of metaphor foregrounded here, I would argue, is its density within such extracts, and the distinctive way in which this motion is construed. Starting with the emanation paths, the ‘blunt refracted rays drummed against his bare chest and shoulders’ can be seen to give the ‘rays’ agency through the verb ‘drummed’, together with the physicality and violence focused by ‘blunt’. In Lakoff and Turner’s terms, it combines this metaphor with a second conventional metaphor EVENTS ARE ACTIONS, in which objects involved in motion are agents in action (1989:  143). The clause which follows in (7b):  ‘drawing out the first sweat’ further extends these metaphors by inviting us to conceptualize the continuation of this motion path beyond its conventional end-point in a further process of extraction. Notably, what is profiled in the source domain by this extension of the metaphor is slightly at odds with what has gone before, since ‘drawing out’ invites us to conceptualize a very different kind of motion to ‘drummed’, and along a path in the opposite direction. Similarly, in (7c) ‘the sun’s light slanting down behind them’ is followed by the phrase ‘opening up the submerged depths’, which profiles two further fictive motion paths. First, a sensory path (Talmy 2000a) describing sight metaphorically, as a movement upwards (‘opening up’), and second, an advent path for the underwater landscape, now moving downwards (‘submerged depths’). Similar creative extensions of the conventional metaphors FORM IS MOTION and EVENTS ARE ACTIONS can be seen in the construal of advent paths, which invite us to conceptualize multiple upward and downward movements of the factories and forests in close succession in (7c): ‘disappeared completely below’, ‘broke surface’, ‘reared up’, ‘smothering’; and a range of agentive and nonagentive movements for the jungle in (7d):  ‘spilled’, ‘rooted itself ’ and ‘matted’. This density of varied linguistic construals and their shifts of direction and agency defamiliarizes these conventional metaphors and makes the natural processes they describe seem strange and fantastical. Yuan (2014:  187) observes a similar effect in her CG analysis of Wordsworth’s poetry, where an extension of ordinary fictive motion paths, ‘arouses a strong sense of dynamicity [. . .] inviting the reader into the literary world’. Similarly, other analysts have argued that fictive motion can contribute to the sense of ‘an alternative experiencing consciousness’ (Rice 2012), or distinctive ‘atmosphere’ for a fictional world (Deggan 2013).3 Drawing on the concepts discussed in Section 7.3, this impression can be understood in terms of mental simulation. In CG our processing of fictive motion representations, like our processing of real motion events, occurs via sequential scanning. In processing fictive motion, ‘instead of tracking an object’s movement, C [the conceptualizer] scans along the path as a way of building up to a full conception of the object’s spatial configuration’ (Langacker 2008: 529). As was

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discussed in Section 7.3, support for this processing, or the mental simulation of this lived perceptual experience, can be seen in experiments which show that processing motion verbs in both factive and fictive contexts has similar embodied effects on neural activation, eye movements, and reaction times (Matlock 2004; Wallentin et al. 2005; Richardson and Matlock 2007). On this basis, we might argue that this text’s foregrounded description of its environment invites a particularly rich simulation of perceived motion as part of its construal. Alongside its creative extension of this metaphor, other patterns in the language of these extracts might be predicted to enrich the mental simulations cued in readers. References to Kerans and the groups of characters he travels with are repeatedly seen alongside specific descriptions of the vantage point from which these perceptions originate:  ‘Looking out from the hotel balcony shortly after eight o-clock, Kerans watched’ (7a); ‘as they moved along through the flat water [. . .] they could see’ (7b); ‘from the hatchway, Kerans scrutinised’ (7c). Indeed highly specific markers of spatial and temporal location are also seen elsewhere in the extracts:  ‘four hundred yards away on the east side of the lagoon’ (7a), ‘almost half a mile in diameter’, ‘fiveand six-storey buildings’ (7b), ‘three hundred feet above the water’, ‘five-mile length of the main channel’ (7c). Together with the adjectives discussed earlier which specify these sensory perceptions, these descriptions put this conceptualizer and his acts of perception ‘onstage’ in attention. Drawing on compatible accounts in CG and narratology, described in Section 7.3, such objectification of an experiencing consciousness, or a specific human-scale perspective, can be seen to cue a rich mental simulation of the perceptions described. As seen in responses to this text, the distinctive quality of this fictional world is one that readers associate with the mindset or psychology described for its main character. The conflicting physical forces of this environment described using fictive motion can be seen to mirror the psychological forces apparently at work in Kerans’ mind, or ‘the fleeting shadows that darted fitfully through its profoundest depths’ (Ballard 2012: 29). As the text continues, these ‘shadows’ are repeatedly referred to and personified as ‘confused and minatory spectres that cast their shadows more and more darkly through his mind’ (p. 61), and are later described as ‘lost’, ‘restive’ and ‘fighting’: 7d. His unconscious was rapidly becoming a well-stocked pantheon of tutelary phobias and obsessions, homing in on to his already over-burdened psyche like lost telepaths. Sooner or later the archetypes themselves would become restive and start fighting each other, anima against persona, ego against id. (pp. 71–2) This semantic treatment of the psyche in terms of conflicting forces once again draws upon conventional conceptual metaphors. Lakoff (1996) identifies a system of metaphors through which we conceptualize the self, the most basic of which is that of the ‘split-self ’, or the metaphor INCOMPATIBLE STRONG NEEDS ARE PEOPLE IN CONFLICT (1996: 105; see also Emmott 2002). This conceptual metaphor can be seen to manifest in everyday language via the description of psychological experiences such as WANTING and SUPPRESSING in terms of a physical source domain of forceful interactions such as PUSHING and BLOCKING (Talmy 2000a: 430). In the expression I held myself back from

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responding, for example, the mental act of self-restraint is represented as a basic forcedynamic interaction between an Agonist (‘myself ’) and an Antagonist (‘I’) which opposes this action, with a resultant state of rest (Talmy 2000a: 431). In The Drowned World, such psycho-dynamic interactions are regularly realized in metaphorical descriptions of Kerans’ thoughts and emotions, as he describes ‘his diminishing control over his own motives’ (Ballard 2012: 39), or his ‘repressing’ of knowledge of his fate (p. 84). Further, the detailed descriptions of conflicting mental processes such as those seen in extract (7d) can be seen as an elaboration (Lakoff and Turner 1989) of this conventional conceptual metaphor by specifying the construal of these Antagonistic forces of self-restraint as ‘spectres’, ‘telepaths’ and ‘archetypes’. These external forces are construed in a range of ways throughout the novel, as exemplified in (7e), as beating ripples of ‘water’, ‘phantoms’ or ‘sentinel birds’. 7e. The water drummed at the portico beneath his feet, beating slowly against his mind, and setting up a widening circle of interference patterns as if crossing it at an opposite direction to his own course of flow [. . .] he wished he could leave the Colonel and walk straight down into the water, dissolve himself and the ever-present phantoms which attended him like sentinel birds in the cool bower of its magical calm, in the luminous, dragon-green, serpent-haunted sea. (pp. 56–7) According to Talmy, a significant property of this force-dynamic model of the psyche is an intrinsic tendency towards rest: ‘one basic state of the central part of the psyche, perhaps its most basic (or ‘unmarked’ state), is that of repose’ (2000a:  435). This is reflected in the linguistic structures used to metaphorically represent it, for example, in statements such as He exerted himself in pressing against the jammed door this tendency towards stasis must be overcome in order to bring about activity (Talmy 2000a: 432). This feature of this conventional source domain would seem to be profiled in extract 7e, and elsewhere in the novel, where Kerans is appears to desire ‘calm’ away from external forces, or ‘the opposing lines of force that encircled him’ (Ballard 2012: 55). As readers in Section 7.4 note, this character's passivity or desire for repose often resembles a desire for death (e.g. by drowning in extract [7e]). Throughout the text, other forms of agency and force are described negatively: the ‘demoniac energy’ of Hardman’s escape (Ballard 2012: 65); the activity of Colonel Riggs ‘buzzing around his diminished, unimportant world’ (p.  75); and, most clearly, the bizarre (and possibly hallucinated) character Stangman’s attempts to dominate this environment, arriving with an army of crocodiles in a ‘violent irruption of noise and energy’ (pp. 82–3). Passivity and stasis, on the other hand, are consistently presented as positive: ‘the slower a clock, the nearer it approximated to the infinitely gradual, and majestic progression of cosmic time’ (p. 63). If we compare this force tendency with Talmy’s discussion of ‘the most basic (or “unmarked” state)’ of the central self (2000a:  435), an interpretation of the novel as a movement towards some kind of ‘authentic and absolute being’ (Stephenson 1985) gains a tentative explanation. Previous work on creative uses of conceptual metaphors has suggested that grounding literary or poetic uses of metaphor in those

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that are conventional is a powerful means of making poetic metaphor seem ‘natural’ (Lakoff and Turner 1989:  143), and cumulatively creating a mind style that is familiar or accessible, despite its foregrounded nature (Black 1993; Semino and Swindlehurst 1996). In this text, its use of conventional metaphors of fictive motion and force dynamics raises the motion and conflict underpinning these descriptions, and the conventional understandings they represent, to conscious attention. This argument provides one explanation for the appeal of Ballard’s novel to some readers, and the concerns expressed by some literary critics that it has a ‘seductive’ or ‘hypnotic’ effect (Section 7.4). Notably, however, for many other readers of this text in both literary criticism and online reviews, this worldview does not appear to be natural or familiar, but instead invites a sense of discomfort or unease towards this focalizer. Ballard’s novel, therefore, can be seen to creatively employ a number of conventional conceptual metaphors as part of its construal of the fictional world. Through a frequent and extended use of fictive motion, in particular, Ballard creates a defamiliarizing perspective on the situations he describes and invites us to simulate the experience of an environment characterized by powerful, conflicting and agent-like natural forces. Through the invitations to map this landscape and its force-dynamic quality onto the mind of its focalizer, as part of a larger elaborated metaphor for the mind, or ‘inner space’ (Ballard 1996), the novel can be seen to draw upon, and defamiliarize, a habitual way in which we think about consciousness in terms of opposing forces. Also contributing to the defamiliarizing effect of these conventional metaphors is the context in which they occur. Readers’ awareness of this text as speculative fiction, and the fantastical elements of the narrative (with its discussion of ‘cosmic time’ and trained crocodiles, for instance), creates ambiguity as to whether such fictive motion and force-dynamic descriptions should be interpreted literally or metaphorically. The unfamiliar conditions described may lead us to question, for example, whether the sun is in fact ‘expanding’ in the sky, or whether it appears so, literally, to this character. As an example of the ‘special effects’ with metaphor possible in narrative (Emmott 2002:  174), halfway through the novel the appearance of the mysterious character ‘Strangman’, Kerans’s doppelganger and nemesis, seems to literalize the split-self metaphor, and the opposing forces described elsewhere in the narrative. Just a few pages before Strangman’s entrance, Kerans considers his increasing difficulty with distinguishing his dreams from reality: 7f. Just as the distinction between the latent and manifest contents of the dream had ceased to be valid, so had any division between the real and the super-real in the external world. Phantoms slid imperceptibly from nightmare to reality and back again. (p. 74) Such blurring of reality and dreams in this text, I would argue, invites similar ambiguity in our interpretation of metaphorical expressions. In the following section, I argue that this effect is furthered by a use of novel similes which blur the boundary between domains as part of this character’s mind style.

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7.6 Novel similes and construal As seen in the responses to this text reviewed earlier in this chapter, readers of The Drowned World often comment upon its distinctive use of figurative language, or ‘imagery’. Looking more closely at these comments, particular attention is given to the use of similes: This novel is drowning in similes like an abandoned building being swallowed by proliferating vegetation. (R44, GR-4) There is also an overabundance of similes that can get annoying. EVERYTHING is ‘like’ something else. (R91, GR-4) filled with trademark metaphors and similes that are sometimes so outlandish you have no choice but to read them twice. (R98, GR-4)

In cognitive linguistics, similes are sometimes viewed as another linguistic manifestation of the same cross-domain mappings involved in metaphor more broadly. A number of researchers, however, have suggested that these linguistic differences correspond to differences in processing (Glucksberg and Keysar 1990; Glucksberg 2003; Bowdle and Gentner 2005). In such accounts, it is suggested that while similes are processed via comparison and cross-domain mapping, true metaphors (e.g. my lawyer is a shark) are processed via categorization, with the target and source understood as members of the same class (Glucksberg 2003). Further, Steen (2011) outlines an important rhetorical distinction between these two forms. Through their explicit linguistic demarcation of two concepts for comparison (e.g. my lawyer is like a shark), similes represent ‘deliberate metaphors’ in drawing attention to their metaphorical nature and their ‘communicative aim of changing an addressee’s perspective on the current local topic’ (Steen 2011: 84). As a result of this explicit signalling and difference of processing, similes are said to facilitate more novel and complex figurative forms (Semino 2008: 17). One explanation for this is that, when expressed as a simile, we are less likely to (mistakenly) interpret a novel metaphor literally (Sanford and Emmott 2012: 65). Considering these differences, the foregrounded use of similes in The Drowned World can be seen to have significance as part of a mind style. Semino and Swindlehurst (1996: 152) argue that ‘as explicit comparisons, similes highlight some form of similarity between domains perceived as clearly distinct’ and can therefore indicate that a character or narrator is aware of the metaphoricity of their description, and does not believe it to be literally true (see also Black 1993). In The Drowned World, this awareness of what is real and what is imagined, or the boundaries between the source and target domains compared by similes, are complicated by the patterns seen in their linguistic construal. First, looking back at the extracts so far examined in the novel, a number of novel similes can be seen: ●

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‘a wide expanding ellipse that fanned out across the eastern horizon like a colossal fire-ball’ (7a) ‘the clear outlines of five- and six-storey buildings looming like giant ghosts’ (7b)

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‘The huge banks of silt lifted above the surface like the backs of yellow sperm whales’ (7c) ‘tutelary phobias and obsessions, homing in on to his already over-burdened psyche like lost telepaths’ (7d) ‘the ever-present phantoms which attended him like sentinel birds’ (7e)

Some of these similes might be described as what Lakoff and Turner (1989; Lakoff 1993)  term ‘image metaphors’. These are ‘one-shot metaphors’, which compare one ‘rich’ visual image with another (Lakoff and Turner 1989: 99; Gleason 2009). In the first example here, it is the visual appearance of a ‘fire-ball’ that is compared with that of the sun; this mapping is not grounded in any conventional mapping of complex knowledge domains and does not invite a rich set of connections or inferences. The same might be said for the comparison between ‘banks of silt’ and ‘yellow sperm whales’. The other novel similes here, however, do not fit this definition. Although similarly unconventional, what is being mapped between the source and target domain of these metaphors is not a concrete visual image, but the motion of an entity that is unfamiliar, fantastical or highly abstract. These kinds of similes are found throughout the narrative. Further examples are seen in extracts (7g) to (7k), with the source domains highlighted in bold for ease of reference. 7g. Screeching like a dispossessed banshee, a large hammer-nosed bat soared straight out of one of the narrow inlets off the creek. (p. 17) 7h. the serpentine terminal touched by the pointer, on the confused, uncertain but curiously potent image summed up by the concept ‘South’, with all its dormant magic and mesmeric power diffusing outwards from the brass bowl held in his hands like the heady vapours of some spectral grail. (p. 46) 7i. Completely obscured by the light and glare, the buildings on the other side of the fountain were no longer continuously visible, looming in and out of the air like the architecture of a spectral city. (p. 68) 7j. they looked down at the wide-domed roof of the planetarium, wreathed in strands of fucus, as Bodkin had said, like a giant shell-palace from a childhood fairy tale. (p. 98) 7k. her breasts smothered under a mass of glittering chains and crescents, like a mad queen in a horror drama. (p. 131) As opposed to the familiar, concrete embodied experiences typically drawn upon as source domains in conceptual metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson 1999), these novel metaphors evoke knowledge of fantasy as their source, such as characters and scenes from fairy tales, myths and horror. This disruption to the prototypical mapping pattern for conceptual metaphors is one which Stockwell (2000: 201) observes as particularly common to science fiction texts, citing examples in which ‘the domain presented as if it is familiar (i.e. stylistically presented as the source) is in fact as alien as the target it is supposed to structure and clarify’. In addition, the target situations represented by these similes also often contain similarly fantastical elements, for example, the ‘ever-present phantoms’ (7e) and the

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‘dormant magic and mesmeric power’ of the compass (7h). Further, these targets often feature fictive motion metaphors, as analysed in the previous section, as part of their construal, for example, the visibility of the buildings ‘looming in and out of the air’ (7i) and the description of a character’s breasts as ‘smothered’ (7k). This overlap between the target and source in terms of (un)familiarity and abstraction can be seen to blur the boundaries between these focused domains as part of their construal. While novel metaphors, and especially those expressed in simile form, are said to invite readers to recognize the distinct nature of the target and source domains, and the literal and metaphorical understanding of what is described (Gibbs 1994; Semino and Swindlehurst 1996), this text can be seen to systematically disrupt this distinction as part of its construal. In further contrast to Lakoff and Turner’s ‘image metaphors’, the novel metaphors seen in this text are not ‘one-offs’ but form a distinctive pattern across the text, through the simple repetition of linguistic forms (e.g. ‘spectral’) and the more complex recurrence of the broad source domain of fantasy, focused, for example, by ‘fairy tale’ (7j) and ‘horror drama’ (7k) (Semino 2008: 23; see also Goatley’s [1997] ‘multivaliency’). Cameron and Low (2004) have suggested that textual uses of metaphor may ‘attract’ other metaphorical expressions that are only loosely connected. Here, expressions with a possible semantic association with a surreal or nightmarish reality, for example, description of Strangman as ‘like a charioteer completely in command of a spirited team’ (Ballard 2012:  82) and his pet crocodiles as ‘like a tame troupe of tarantulas’ (p. 88) can be said to contribute to the extension of this rich source domain across the text, and its progressively broad ‘scope’ of connected targets (Kövesces 2000). Contrary to the claims of Lakoff ’s (1990) ‘invariance hypothesis’, this analysis relies upon a view of conceptual domains, not as fixed, stable entities, but as dynamic structures which are partially constructed or altered using textual input (see also Stockwell 1999; Semino 2008). A further pattern in the use of similes can be seen in extracts (7l) to (7n). Although these similes do not clearly focus a source domain of fantasy or myth, it is the nature of their grammatical construal, in particular, the specificity and prominence of the situations they describe as the source, that lends them a surreal or dreamlike quality. 7l. His plump face, topped by an untidy grey thatch, seemed preoccupied and wistful, scanning the surrounding ring of half-submerged buildings like a weary ship’s chandler being rowed around a harbour for the thousandth time. (p. 39) 7m. Many of the cardboard screens had sprung off their drawing pins, and hung forwards into the air like the peeling hull-plates of a derelict ship, moored against its terminal pier and covered with gnomic and meaningless graffiti. (p. 40) 7n. she would be sitting on the patio or before a mirror in her bedroom, automatically applying endless layers of patina, like a blind painter forever retouching a portrait he can barely remember for fear that otherwise he will forget it completely. (p. 88)

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Here the specificity with which these source domains are construed meets and sometimes exceeds that of the target. The detailed situations described (in bold) invite us to conceptualize these source domains, not as schematic abstractions, but as individual instantiations of lived experience. It is not clear, however, whose experiences they are, especially since the focalizer, Kerans, has never lived in the twentieth-century cities he floats above. These source domains are also likely to be prominent in readers’ attention, since they contain entities which are new, both syntactically, being situated at the end of the sentence, and semantically, as more unusual or interesting than the relatively familiar entities focused in the target domain. Looking at extract (7n) more closely, the imaginary ‘blind painter’ whose thoughts and feelings are profiled in the source domain is greater in empathetic recognizability than the female character ‘she’ in the text world, whose emotions are not described, and who is rather construed as lacking in mental states through ‘automatically’ and the dominion associations of inanimacy and artificiality focused by ‘patina’. The prominence and specificity of this source domain, and that seen in the other examples given here, could be seen to reverse the typical figure–ground alignment of the domains focused by metaphor, as described in CG (Section 7.3; Figure 7.1). Here it is the source domain, or the imagined fictive situation, which is foregrounded as opposed to the entity being described in the text world. As was described in Section 7.3, in CG our resulting conception of meaning for a metaphorical expression is described as a blended conception, which is formed based on ‘connections’ established between source and target. A  final way in which the prototypical relationship between these domains is disrupted here is through the complexity of the connections we are invited to make. Immediately following the simile in extract (7n), we get a further metaphorical expression: ‘Her hair was always dressed immaculately, the make-up on her mouth and eyes exquisitely applied, but her withdrawn, isolated gaze gave her the waxen, glace beauty of an inanimate mannequin’ (p. 88). Here the mapping invited between Beatrice and ‘blind painter’ must be reconceptualized as she is now compared to the portrait as opposed to the painter, and her ‘withdrawn, isolated gaze’ mapped now onto the blindness of the mannequin. These kinds of complications to the blend can be identified elsewhere in the text, for example, in extract (7o), where we see the predatory character ‘Strangman’ smiling at Beatrice: 7o. He leaned around on one elbow and smiled at Beatrice, who sat with her hands discretely covering her bare knees, like a mouse observing a particularly fine cat. (p. 92) Here, the features we are invited to map from this source domain onto the characters are a reversal of what we would normally expect in terms of roles. In both these examples, as Stockwell (2000) suggests, the complexity involved in the mapping can be seen to result in a widened range of possible inferences. Altogether, this text’s metaphorical construal of its fictional world can be seen to disrupt the distinction between the source and target domains focused as part of

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a developing conceptualization of the text world. This effect can be compared with stylistic techniques associated with surrealism: ‘where foreground and background are reversed and made interchangeable to the point at which the cognitive distinction between the two becomes difficult to maintain’ (Stockwell 2003:  23). Describing Surrealism’s influence on his writing, Ballard (1996) defines the worlds of his fiction as a paradoxical universe where dream and reality become fused together, each retaining its own distinctive quality and yet in some way assuming the role of its opposite, and where by an undeniable logic black simultaneously becomes white. (p. 200)

Combined with the creative extensions and elaborations of conventional metaphors analysed in the previous section, the processing of these novel similes can be seen to contribute to readers’ embodied experience of this text as ‘fevered’, ‘trippy’ and ‘dreamlike’ in nature (Section 7.4). Unlike conventional metaphors such as those analysed in the previous section, these novel similes are not grounded in basic, concrete bodily experiences of the world, and this perhaps explains why they appear unfamiliar, or ‘so outlandish you have to read them twice’ (R98, GR-4). Even so, such uses of language are examples of the ‘virtual’ or fictive situations that language enables us to conjure up, and which, according to CG, we are able to simulate using our embodied cognitive resources. The nature of such simulations remains an area in need of further investigation in cognitive stylistics, especially for highly novel figurative language such as that examined here. This chapter has offered a starting point for this discussion, but, clearly, there is more work to be done.

7.7 Resisting a mind style The cumulative effects of the complex patterns of metaphors and similes across this text is a breakdown of the distinction between what is factive and fictive within the world described. While creative uses of conventional conceptual metaphors create uncertainty as to whether these focalized descriptions should be interpreted as metaphorical, or as literal descriptions of Kerans’ perceptions, the novel similes in this text invite us to focus knowledge of dreams and fantasy, and draw attention to this source at the expense of the physical target situations described. In this text, therefore, metaphor seems to disrupt understanding, rather than facilitating it, as part of the construction of the text world. The result of this uncertainty is a ‘hallucinatory’ or ‘dream-like’ experience (Section 7.4), in which dreams appear to seep into reality and dominate the decisions made by the characters. Importantly, this merging of dream and reality reflects that described by the character-focalizer himself, and by other characters in the course of the novel. By inviting us to enact the characters’ cognitive processing for ourselves through this metaphorical construal, Ballard can be seen to invite us to understand and even empathize with their mindset, and the psychological

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effects of ‘the continuous heat and the massive daily doses of antibiotics [that] drained all energy from them’ (Ballard 2012: 13). The enactment of this mindset, and the blurred understanding of this world which underpins it, might be seen as responsible for the difficulties of ethical response also described in Section 7.4. For Wendland (1985) this difficulty results from a failure to ‘objectify’ this worldview alongside the world presented through it, stating that ‘[science fiction] by necessity must define its background as well as its foreground, its frame as well as its central topic, its perceiving subjects as well as its perceived objects’ (1985: 155). For Wendland, the problem is a lack of an alternative perspective in the text. Like other readers in my sample of online reviews (Section 7.4), he notes the caricature-like nature of the other characters in the novel, who, in the manner of mainstream science fiction (Section 1.4), resemble ‘tokens’, such as the ‘femme-fatale’ (Beatrice) or ‘villain’ (Strangman), or are objects of parody (Colonel Riggs). By providing no opportunity to consider Kerans’ worldview from another perspective, the extent to which his attitudes are inevitable responses to his environment, or idiosyncratic, nihilistic and possibly pathological, is difficult to discern. Like I Am Legend, analysed in the previous chapter, readers of this text are denied the opportunity to attribute rich minds and worldviews to other characters in this text (e.g. the more rational Colonal Riggs) during their reading, in this case owing to their caricature-like presentation. Unlike I Am Legend, however, readers do not have the opportunity to re-construe the fictional world and its focalizer from the perspective of another character in the final chapter. Finally, I would suggest that, although The Drowned World, like I Am Legend, makes use of free indirect style for its representation of Kerans’ thought, there is little sense of a distinction between this focalizer and the third-person narrator, which could prompt an alternative construal alongside that of Kerans (see Section 6.7). The approach developed in the previous chapter could be used to investigate the consequences of these stylistic choices in terms of cues for mind attribution and their significance for ethical interpretation. The analysis here strikes an interesting contrast to previous analyses of mind style in terms of conceptual metaphor by Semino and Swindlehurst (1996) and by Black (1993). In Semino and Swindlehurst’s analysis of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (see Section 7.2) metaphorical expressions were said to be understood as literal for the character and metaphorical for the reader. Describing a similar effect in The Inheritors, Black (1993: 39) argues that this results in a ‘Janus-like’ juxtaposition of minds or worldviews, which highlights the differences between readers’ minds and those of the Neanderthal characters, as well as the links that exist between us and them. Through its blurring of the literal and the metaphorical, The Drowned World can be seen to present readers not with a juxtaposition of worldviews, but one, disorienting perspective on the world it presents. As the only means of access to this unfamiliar world, the strange mind style presented is one which we must enact in order to make sense of it; it is ‘constitutive’ of the reality presented (Stockwell 2000: 203). In this way, and through the conventional metaphors or habitual understandings drawn upon by its construal, this text can be seen to invite us to recognize the similarities between our own worldviews and those of these characters, or ‘the skull beneath the skin of civilised humanity’ they represent (Self 2013).

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7.8 Conclusion Metaphor is a vast and ever-growing area of research in cognitive linguistics, and this chapter has, by necessity, merely scratched the surface. Taking previous cognitive stylistic research on metaphor and mind style as a point of departure, this chapter has explored the ways in which conventional and novel metaphors contribute to the impression of a distinctive mind, and their ability to defamiliarize the habitual ways in which we comprehend our reality. CG looks to cognitive semantic theories for its discussion of figurative language and subsumes metaphor into a general model of meaning construction in terms of multiple domains. However, as many theorists have argued, metaphor is a linguistic as well as a cognitive phenomenon, and its range of textual manifestations require close attention for a proper understanding of its significance (e.g. Semino 2008; Browse 2014). This chapter has argued that the CG account of construal can help to explain the stylistic effects of metaphorical expressions in discourse. This includes the specific ways in which conceptual metaphors are combined, extended and elaborated using language (Lakoff and Turner 1989); and the felt experience of a mind style through an enactment, or mental simulation, of the processing habits that metaphors represent. In The Drowned World, patterns in the use of conventional conceptual metaphors FORM IS MOTION, EVENTS ARE ACTIONS and INCOMPATIBLE DESIRES ARE PEOPLE IN CONFLICT defamiliarize these habitual ways of conceiving and describing our experiences. Meanwhile, construal of the source and target domains compared by novel similes disrupt a clear distinction between them, and the dreams and reality that they represent in this text. In a speculative fiction context, the presentation of such an unfamiliar perspective on an already unfamiliar world can create issues for interpretation (Hoover 2004). Here, the effect of these uses of metaphor is a disrupted understanding of what is literal and metaphorical for its focalizer, and a distinctive embodied experience during reading which reflects the hallucinatory, ‘trippy’ experience described by this character himself. Supported by my sample of reader responses to the text, this analysis supports this book’s central argument that a mind style may be felt, or cognitively enacted, by a reader during the course of a text. Embodied responses to texts such as those investigated in this chapter represent an area of ongoing research in literary studies (e.g. Caracciolo 2014; Burke et al. 2016). A  stylistically focused way into this discussion, I  have argued, is the nature of the processing invited by particular linguistic construals. As a counterpoint to the analysis of attenuation seen in previous chapters, this chapter has suggested linguistic patterns that enrich simulations as part of a distinctive mind style. The nature of such linguistic choices, and the role of figurative language in particular, are questions which further stylistic study and empirical testing will help to uncover.

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Conclusion

8.1 A cognitive grammar of mind style This book has explored a much-discussed phenomenon in stylistics – the way in which linguistic patterns in texts create the impression of an alternative mind or worldview. Through the application of CG as an analytical framework, my aim has been to update and enrich previous discussions and bring these together as part of a unified cognitive stylistic approach to mind style. Central to the approach developed here is attention to the mind of the reader involved in the interpretation of mind styles, and its relationship with that of the character or narrator portrayed. Cognitive stylistics is sometimes defined (and at other times criticized) as being primarily concerned with readers and reading, or ‘hypothesising about what happens during the reading process and how this influences the interpretations that readers generate about the texts they are reading’ (Jeffries and McIntyre 2010:  126). The work here can be seen to fall under this description, but with two important qualifications – first, that language is placed at the forefront of the discussion; and second, that the hypothesizing involved is systematic and based on the principles of an externally developed framework. More often than not, such a focus on reading and cognition involves turning a spotlight on aspects of interpretation that are already assumed or hypothesized in previous stylistic analyses. The traditional, much-cited definition of mind style, first given by Fowler (1977: 76), described it as the ‘impression of a world-view’ arising from cumulative, consistent style choices. Embedded within this impression, and subsequently unpicked by further research, are recognitions of deviation and point of view, along with a range of affective, aesthetic and ethical responses to character. The approach here has set out to explain how this complex impression arises and contributes to our wider experiences of texts, in a way which is in line with current understandings of language and mind in cognitive linguistics. As described by Bockting, the structural choices contributing to mind style concern ‘the whole field of linguistics’ (1994:  160). Consequently, no (book-length) study of mind style could ever hope to be comprehensive. By applying a range of CG concepts, I have proposed an account of the effects of just a selection of linguistic choices as part of a mind style. In Chapter 4, the contribution of syntax to impressions of a certain kind of thought processes for a character was explained in terms of its consequences

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for prominence and dynamicity in readers’ conceptualizations of a fictional world. In Chapter 5, the impression of the knowledge possessed by a character created through choices of lexis was described in terms of the variable focusing of readers’ encyclopaedic knowledge along a mental path or reference point chain. Chapter  6 explained the effects of transitivity choices for readers’ impressions of agency and accountability in terms of their profiling of an action chain in readers’ attention. Finally, in Chapter 7, the contribution of metaphors and similes to a defamiliarizing perspective on a fictional world was discussed in terms of their construal of the source and target domains mapped by specific expressions. Such a reexamination of long-established and repeatedly observed stylistic effects lends further detail to their discussion in terms of the reader processing which underpins them. The prediction of these interpretative effects in the independent framework of CG, and its reliance upon externally (and, wherever possible, empirically) validated concepts in the cognitive sciences, offers a degree of support for such effects, the need for which in stylistics is ongoing (Fish 1980; Toolan 1990; Sanford and Emmott 2012). Having generated these detailed hypotheses, the next step will be to test them using appropriate psycholinguistic methods. Underpinning any discussion of mind style, and style in general, are the notions of deviation and parallelism, or the qualities that make a linguistic pattern foregrounded for readers. In a CG account, linguistic deviation is explained in terms of the prototypicality of linguistic choices relative to those construals which are conventional for members of a speech community. Prototypical, ‘canonical’ or ‘default’ construals provide an embodied (as opposed to a statistical, or corpusderived) basis for the ‘norm’ against which linguistic choices are foregrounded. Significantly, this embodied understanding of deviation means that analysis of mind style in these CG terms can identify a range of different linguistic forms as foregrounded and contributing to its effect, and these can be localized, even isolated, within a text. Adopting Fowler’s definition of mind style as ‘cumulatively consistent structural options’, subsequent stylistic applications of this concept have emphasized the consistency necessary for its foregrounded effect, and the need for a statistical means of supporting this claim (McIntyre and Archer 2010). While corpus methodologies are undoubtedly a useful tool for the analysis of mind style, in particular the search for patterns of linguistic structures across texts, the CG account of mind style adopted here identifies a range of linguistic choices which are cumulatively consistent in terms of their effects for conceptualization in the mind of the reader, as opposed to (or alongside) the forms themselves. This was seen in Chapter  4, for example, where uses of punctuation, parallelism, coordination and negation were seen to disrupt a summation at both sentence and discourse levels of the text, giving rise to an overall impression of the restricted worldview of its narrator. Since all linguistic choices in CG can be described in terms of just a handful of construal dimensions and a single overarching ‘construal configuration’ (Verhagen 2007), patterns of effect (e.g. disrupted summation) can be identified across multiple structures, at multiple levels of language. As part of this cognitive stylistic approach to mind style, I have drawn upon a range of other stylistic and cognitive concepts in order to discuss the ways in which mind styles are experienced by readers. Drawing on research into experiential iconicity

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(Enkvist 1981) and mental simulation (Barsalou 1999) I have argued that the linguistic patterns contributing to a mind style result in a felt ‘enactment’ of cognitive habits as part of readers’ conceptualization of the fictional world (Leech and Short 2007). Support for this claim was observed through analysis of reader responses to my chosen texts, in which readers in both literary criticism and online reviews were often seen to draw connections between their experience of the fictional world and the perspective of the text’s character/narrator. Such an enactment goes some way to explaining the self-implicating effects of mind style (Kuiken et  al. 2004), or its power to invite identification and empathy. Drawing on neuroscientific research into empathy and mind attribution, I have suggested that the interpretation of a mind style inevitably invites empathy in readers, but that the felt quality of this experience will vary according to a reader’s individual knowledge, identity and dispositions. In responses to all four of the novels analysed in this book, engagement with the mind style presented was described as an uncomfortable or unsettling experience by some readers. These experiences, I have argued, reflect the way in which mind styles invite us to share in, or enact, the worldviews of others in the process of reading.

8.2 What stylistics can do for cognitive grammar CG’s ambitious objective is to provide a ‘fully comprehensive’ theory of language, which ‘deal[s] in a unified manner with any aspect of language structure’ (Langacker 2014: xiv). While the focus of this book has primarily been the insights offered by CG for stylistics, applications to discourse such as those demonstrated here can also be seen to support the aims of the theory. The application of CG to literary discourse enriches its account of what I  have labelled, using Halliday’s (1994) terminology, the ‘interpersonal’ and ‘textual’ functions of language. Following Verhagen (2007) the interpersonal function was modelled in this book in terms of perspective within construal, or the linguistic structuring of the relationship between multiple conceptualizers interacting via a text. Through the application of this model to discourse and investigation of its situated effects on readers, this work contributes to the development of a more socially engaged and critical CG, which attends to the functioning of language as ‘social action’ as well as conceptualization (Edwards 1997; see also Stockwell 2001; Hart 2014). Development of the textual function in CG relates to the role of grammatical choices in contributing to structure building at the discourse level (Section 3.6). Here, this work has built on that of  Dancygier (2012) and Harrison (2017), which considers the ‘scalability’ of clause-level concepts for this purpose, and which, like the approach taken here, make use of other compatible discourse frameworks (e.g. conceptual integration theory, systemic-functional grammar and text world theory) as scaffolding. By demonstrating the application of concepts such as prominence, dynamicity, focusing and perspective to our processing of the mental spaces or text worlds constructed across a text, this work contributes to the development of a cognitive discourse grammar capable of accounting for stylistic choices across multiple levels of linguistic organization.

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In the previous section I suggested that the prediction of interpretative effects in CG can lend support to stylistic analysis. The inverse is also true; reader responses to texts can be seen to offer support for claims made in CG about the phenomenological effects of specific linguistic structures. A number of researchers have identified the need for more empirical support for claims made in cognitive linguistics (e.g. Geeraerts 2006; Hollmann 2013; Langacker 2014; Broccais and Hollmann 2017). The explanatory power of concepts in CG in accounting for reader experiences of texts can be seen to provide one source of ‘psychological plausibility’ (Langacker 2008: 14), alongside that obtained from other sources. In this respect, the qualitative analysis of online reader reviews used here was limited, since it is certainly not possible to draw direct connections between readers’ general, undirected, post hoc responses and specific linguistic structures. For this purpose, procedures adopted in empirical studies of narrative, such as eye-tracking and think-aloud protocols, would be better suited. While online reviews provide an easily accessible source of unmediated insights into readers’ experiences of texts, a combined approach, including experimental methods, could allow the researcher to target specific questions, such as those which have arisen here. Some questions for future research include: the precise attribution(s) of linguistic choices to author, narrator or character (Chapters  4 and 5); the distinction between first and second readings of a text in terms of readers’ online attributions of mind (Chapter 6); and the role of mental simulations in the experience of mind style (Chapter 7). Finally, applications of CG to literary discourse generate insights into the complexity of experiential effects in context. Such complexities include the creative manipulation of prominence and reference point relationships through textual strategies for foregrounding and burying (Chapter 5), and the disruptions to prototypical assessments of empathetic recognizability (Chapter  6) and metaphorical/literal interpretation (Chapter  7) enabled by the types of entities and contexts encountered in literature. The variability of readers’ experiences of the same linguistic patterns revealed through analysis of reader responses highlights further factors affecting the conceptualizations cued by language, including the variable knowledge, motivations and dispositions of readers, which must also be taken into account. As Langacker has noted, ‘the extensive application to literature will require and inspire significant elaboration of the framework’ (2014: xiv). As a rich and culturally valued form of usage-based data, the ‘elaboration’ provoked through literary application can be seen as essential if CG is to offer a unified theory of naturally occurring language.

8.3 Strange minds in strange worlds The four mind styles which I  have analysed here can all be seen to pose an interpretative challenge for readers. In his typology of relationships between worlds and minds, Hoover (2004:  104) describes ‘strange things or events strangely perceived’ as a relationship that is ‘likely to result in a relatively opaque text’, and he gives The Inheritors as an example. In the texts analysed here, this challenge lies not just in readers’ mental representations of the fictional world and the entities

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within it, but also in their ethical responses to the character or narrator, and the author responsible (see Phelan 1996, 2005, 2007; Whiteley 2014; Nuttall 2015, 2017). Central to this ethical response, I  would argue, is the invitation to reflect upon our own cognitive habits, and wider embodied experiences as human beings, which mind styles can present. As was discussed in Chapter 2, the concept of mind style is generally understood to be most useful when describing minds that are in some way unusual or distinctive (e.g. McIntyre 2006; Stockwell 2009; Hoover 2016). For example, in the extract from Under the Skin (Faber 2000) with which I started this book (Section 1.1), the mind portrayed is, for me at least, strange or striking. Defining this distinctiveness implies a cognitive norm that is separate to the linguistic norm, and corresponding linguistic ‘deviation’ and ‘foregrounding’, discussed throughout this book (see also Semino 2008: 52–4 for the separation of conceptual and linguistic deviation). While cognitive linguistics offers a possible basis for defining this cognitive norm in terms of universal cognitive principles, to do so would ignore the complexities and idiosyncrasies of reading and readers that cognitive stylistic analysis repeatedly reveals. Instead, it seems more appropriate to say that this basis for comparison lies in the individual minds of readers. In other words, while the language of Under the Skin is linguistically deviant or foregrounded in relation to the norms of Standard English owing to its over-specified description of the hitchhikers, the mind it represents may plausibly seem more or less unusual from one reader to the next (though I suspect many would share my response). Linguistic distinctiveness and cognitive distinctiveness are two separate things. Precisely how we reconcile awareness of this difference with an embodied cognitive linguistic account of language is a question for cognitive stylistics. Speculative fiction provides numerous examples of distinctive minds in the alternative or future versions of humanity it presents, which can be powerful and resonant in their emotive and ethical effects on readers (for more examples, see Hoover 2016). Recent developments in the study of mind style have seen it applied to new types of texts and characters: to representations of psychological conditions such as autism (Semino 2014), schizophrenia (Demjén and Semino 2015), depression (Demjén 2015) and dementia (Harrison 2017), and in representations of true crime (Gregoriou 2011). Where mind style provides a means of representing different kinds of real-life minds and worldviews, its ethical implications, or its capacity to defamiliarize and question what we take to be normal, become even more significant.

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Notes Chapter 1: Introduction 1 The website’s claim to represent ‘the world’s largest community of readers’, with a total of over 30 million members (and 34 million reviews) from across the globe (Goodreads 2015a), is supported through examination of the reviews themselves, which include responses from members who, according to their member profiles, are variously located in North and South Americas, Europe and Asia and span a wide range of age groups. 2 According to its ‘Terms of Use’, Goodreads (2015b) does not claim ownership rights on content posted, and users are advised that they are placing this content in a public area.

Chapter 3: Cognitive grammar 1 Although less detailed than the earlier two-volume description of the theory (Langacker 1987, 1991), this introduction contains a clearer classification of the dimensions of construal, which are particularly relevant to the application described in this book. 2 This metaphor has a wider significance in CG, which views perception as subsumed under conception as a ‘special case’, and applies terms like ‘viewer’ and ‘viewing’ to both (Langacker 2008: 261; see also Talmy’s [2000a, 2000b] combined notion of ception). Notably, however, Langacker (2007: 452) specifies the term ‘construal’ in place of the earlier ‘imagery’ (Langacker 1987: 110) as a means of avoiding confusion with the specific cognitive phenomena of visual ‘mental imagery’ (Kosslyn 1980). 3 Indeed, Langacker’s (2007) outline of construal states that such distinctions are for ‘expository purposes only’ (p. 452). 4 Notably, while Langacker makes no distinction between such experiential knowledge and other forms of linguistic knowledge, in LCCM theory, Evans (2009a) suggests that simulation-producing cognitive models should be distinguished from semantic knowledge, or lexical concepts, on developmental grounds. 5 This coincides with Zwaan’s (2004) immersed experiencer framework, in which attentional frames define the level of linguistic organization at which individual mental simulations are cued and integrated in discourse comprehension to form a mental representation (or situation model) in memory. 6 They can also be viewed as roughly equivalent to mental spaces (Dancygier 2012), contextual frames (Emmott 2003) and situation models (Butler 2007).

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Chapter 4: Syntax and thought 1 Fowler describes this syntax using terminology from Chomskyan transformationalgenerative grammar (1957), for example, ‘deep structures’, and earlier ‘transformational deletion’. The relationship between generative grammar and cognitive grammar, and the application of such concepts in stylistic analysis is beyond the scope of this book. 2 Langacker does not explicitly align his account with any of these psychological perspectives. He states that his account of attention is ‘not tied to any particular psychological theory’, but rather its ‘mostly self-evident’ effects (1987: 115).

Chapter 5: Lexis and knowledge 1 Notably, Evans’ (2009a) LCCM theory makes a similar proposal to that set out here, describing the lexical concepts corresponding to word choices as providing ‘access routes’ through a set of cognitive models, the tracing of which is responsible for the generation of contextually specific meaning (2009a: 74). 2 In the BNC, the ten most frequent collocates of ‘carer’ (± nine words) include ‘patient’ and ‘sufferer’, while the ten most frequent collocates of ‘donor’ include ‘insemination’, ‘blood’ and ‘organ(s)’ (Davies 2004). 3 Again, the BNC provides some possible linguistic support for this claim. Examination of the most frequent collocates for ‘rounders’ (± nine words) includes ‘football’ as the most frequent collocate, followed by words such as ‘Miss’, ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ within the twenty-five most frequent. This supports my intuition that, at least in the case of ‘rounders’, collocational associations with school and childhood are likely to exist for British readers. A more detailed analysis of the ‘collocation network’ surrounding these terms could provide a clearer test of the predictions I make with regard to this reference point chain (Brezina et al. 2015).

Chapter 6: Transitivity and worldview 1 These are my calculations based on my chosen passage and are added for clarity of comparison with Halliday’s analysis of The Inheritors. Simpson did not quantify his analysis, but drew on examples from multiple chapters to support his point. 2 In fact, Halliday makes a similar suggestion in his systemic-functional grammar, arguing that the processes in the transitivity model can be divided into two basic types: ‘those that are regarded as due to an external cause, an agency other than the person or object involved, and those that are not’ (1971: 359). 3 It is such problems with this concept that perhaps motivated its absence from Langacker’s later work (2008). 4 This model of the vampire is jokingly cast aside within the narrative itself by Robert Neville, who reads a copy of Stoker’s novel and briefly quotes from it (Matheson 2001: 23).

Chapter 7: Metaphor and mind 1 The expression ‘mental breakdown’ is another example of the conventional metaphor underpinning Bromden’s discourse.

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2 Supporting this interpretation, in an interview, Ballard describes the apocalyptic transformations of our world depicted in The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World as ‘positive, good changes’ which ‘lead us to our psychological goals’. He adds, ‘Really, I’m trying to show a new kind of logic emerging, and this is to be embraced, or at least held in regard’ (Goddard and Pringle 1976: 40). 3 Interestingly, one of the texts that Deggan (2013) discusses in terms of this effect is Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which is a novel that readers often compare to Ballard’s novel, in both literary criticism and my sample of online reviews.

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Index abstraction; see schematization action chains 44–6, 123–4, 136–41 action identification 113–14, 123 agent  meronymic/metonymic  120–2 moral 128, 141–6 participant 45, 114, 122–4, 138–9 analyzability  36 archetypal roles  45–6 atemporalization 78, 123, 135–6, 139 atemporal relationship 40–1, 43, 55 atmosphere 44, 95, 115, 166 attention 37, 39–44, 63–4, 73–4, 77–9, 95–6, 105–6, 122–3, 126–7, 144–6, 156 distributed 41, 47–8, 56–9, 64, 84–6, 107, 149–50 see also prominence attentional frames 51, 55, 63, 72–3, 77, 83 attenuation 48–9, 58, 79, 116, 135, 147, 159–60 see also simulation attractors 63, 164–6 Atwood, Margaret 8, 66–9 authorial style 19, 69–70, 85 backtracking  108 Ballard, J. G.  160–2 blending; see conceptual integration burying 96–7, 105–10 canonical event model 123, 138 characterization 20, 24–7, 46, 151 cognitive semantics 6, 34– 5 cognitive stylistics 5–6, 23–4, 27–1, 177–9 coherence 44, 65, 94–5, 103–4 cohesion 15, 44, 94, 105 composition 35–6, 65, 156 composite structure 35–6, 51, 54, 73 compositional path  36, 42 see also structure building

conceptual integration 24, 35, 50–1, 155–6, 173–4 conceptualizers 37–8, 46–8, 53, 56–9, 85, 111, 148–50 construal 16, 34, 37–48 construction grammars  34, 36 constructions 35–7, 83 conventionality 14, 35–6, 41, 49–50, 80–8, 94, 154 corpus methods 22, 95, 103, 114, 178 current discourse space (CDS) 49–50, 55, 104 defamiliarization 9, 14, 30–1, 35, 91, 113–14, 116, 160, 166, 169 deictic shifts  56–9 deixis 47, 85, 133, 149 deviation 9, 18–22, 28, 41–2, 178, 181 domains 39, 93–4, 155–6 source and target 77, 153–7, 170–3 dominion 44, 93–5, 103–5 dynamicity 37, 42–4, 64–6, 78–9, 166 embodiment 10, 14, 34, 157–60, 163–4, 174 emotion 27–30, 84–5, 101–2, 114–16 see also empathy, sympathy empathetic recognizability 41, 74, 77, 123–4, 136, 173, 180 empathy 28–30, 57–9, 70, 99, 127, 131, 133, 142, 147–9, 163, 179 enactment 66, 79, 84, 98, 110–11, 174–5, 176, 179 entrenchment 35–6, 49, 81–2, 94, 105 estrangement  2, 9 see also defamiliarization experiencer 45–6, 138, 145 experientiality 3, 24, 116, 132 experiential realism 16, 20, 34 ethical judgements 3, 29, 57, 85–6, 97–8, 111, 128, 133, 140–6, 161, 175, 181

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212 fictive motion 158–9, 165–7 figure/ground 39–41, 63, 73–4, 144, 147 focalization; see point of view focusing 37, 39, 93–4, 127, 156–7 force dynamics  167–8 foregrounding 19, 20, 22, 42, 72, 74, 77, 95–6, 103, 117, 154 see also deviation frames; see schema theory free indirect discourse; see thought presentation function-advancing  55–6 ground 46–7, 50, 55–6, 85–6 grounding 46, 73, 76, 85, 111 habitualization  14, 82 I Am Legend (Matheson)  128–50 iconicity 65, 73, 78–9, 86 identification; see self-implication ideology 14–15, 17, 20–1, 28, 80–3, 111, 151 image schemas 34, 40, 44, 53, 123 immersion 28, 57–8, 84–5, 103, 158, 162–4, 169 instrument 45, 123, 140–1 intermentality  143–7 irony 95, 149–50 Ishiguro, Kazuo  97–100 knowledge incrementation 56, 95, 117 linguistic unit 35–6, 38–9, 49–50 Matheson, Richard  128–30 mental spaces 50–1, 54–6, 60, 75–6, 106, 155, 179 metaphor 23–4, 76–7, 144–5, 153–8, 166–9, 170–1, 173–4 image  171–2 see also simile mind attribution 26–7, 29–30, 114–15, 122–8, 134–47, 175 mind-modelling; see mind attribution modality 46, 77–8, 85, 107, 111, 149 mover 45, 138–40

Index narration external  17 first-person 17, 85, 111–12, 148 internal 17, 29, 70, 130, 133, 149 third-person 17, 149–50, 175 narrative gap 108, 141 negation  76 neosemes 103, 110 Never Let Me Go (Ishiguro)  97–116 objective construal 46–7, 58–9, 78, 145, 148, 159 over-lexicalisation 90, 102 patient moral 128, 141–2, 151 participant 45, 123, 138–40, 146 perspective in cognitive grammar 37, 46–8, 53, 56–9, 84–5, 147–50, 179 in narratology; see point of view plot 9, 24, 100–1, 109–10, 122, 136, 162–4, 145 point of view 16–18, 48, 56, 148–50 ideological 20–1, 46, 80–3, 111 postmodernism 67, 70–1 processing time 42–4, 64, 74 profiling 40, 45–6, 122–3 projection; see deictic shifts prominence 37, 39–42, 58, 63–5, 73–4, 83, 95–6, 107, 109–10, 124, 143–4, 147, 164–5, 172–3 prototypicality 9, 41, 45, 51, 73, 103–4, 113–14, 135, 156, 171–3, 178 see also canonical event model psychological plausibility 52–3, 60, 94–5, 149, 178 reader dispositions 28, 30, 42, 127, 141, 150, 179, 180 reader response research 6–8, 68–71, 84, 100–2, 130–3, 148, 162–4, 170, 180 reconstrual 41–2, 83, 85, 108 reference point chain 43–4, 51, 93–7, 103–8, 116, 127 resources; see attention

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Index scalability 51, 179 schema 24, 90–3, 95, 102–4 schema refreshment 31, 90, 91, 104 schema reinforcement 31, 105 see also domains schematization 35–6, 49–50, 81–2, 86, 173 scope 39–40, 94, 139 self-implication 29, 57, 84, 110–11, 179 self-modifying feelings 28, 30, 116 sequential scanning 43–4, 64–5, 73–5, 78–9, 135, 139, 144, 146, 159, 166 simile 76–7, 154–5, 170–4 simulation 26, 29–30, 48–9, 58, 64, 78–9, 96, 109, 116, 124, 126, 135, 157–60, 166–7, 174 specificity 38–9, 112–16, 135, 172–3, 181 speculative fiction 2–3, 8–10, 50, 66, 70, 92, 97, 103, 129, 160, 181 fantasy 8, 169, 171–2 horror 99, 127, 129, 131, 136 science fiction 8–9, 160, 171, 175 speech presentation 75–6, 106–7 structure building 16, 50–1, 53–4, 65, 179 subjective construal 47, 58–9, 84–5, 135, 137, 145, 147, 149–50, 159 summary scanning 43–4, 64–5, 135, 139, 144–5 see also summation 73–9, 83, 86, 178 suspense 108, 131, 136 sympathy 28–9, 49, 57–8, 70, 133, 163 systemic-functional grammar 4–5, 13–16, 21, 45, 50, 52–4, 55, 94, 119–20, 151

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text-drivenness 55–6, 94–5, 105, 117 text worlds 54–9, 65, 75–6, 94–5, 102–3, 107, 117, 148, 151, 156 The Drowned World (Ballard)  160–76 The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood)  66–86 The Inheritors (Golding) 3–5, 90, 120–1, 123, 140, 154–5, 175, 180 Theory of Mind; see mind attribution thought presentation  26 direct thought  133–4 free indirect thought 17, 130, 133–4, 148–50 trajector/landmark alignment 40–2, 45, 63, 73, 124 transformational-generative grammar 4–5, 184 n.1 transitivity 4, 45–6, 119–23, 138–41, 151 under-lexicalization 4, 89–91 Under the Skin (Faber) 1–2, 38, 39, 41, 42, 45, 47, 181 usage-based data 7, 36, 52, 180 usage event 35, 49–51, 55 vantage point 46–7, 48, 73, 84, 113, 147, 167 viewing arrangement 16, 37, 46, 50 vividness 48, 116, 133, 159, 161–4 well-formedness 34–5, 41 world-building 9, 36, 55–6, 60, 65, 70, 95, 117

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