The Language of Stories
eBook - PDF

The Language of Stories

A Cognitive Approach

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

The Language of Stories

A Cognitive Approach

About this book

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

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Yes, you can access The Language of Stories by Barbara Dancygier in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Languages & Linguistics & Linguistic Semantics. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. The Language of Stories
  3. Title
  4. Copyright
  5. for Jacek and Szymek
  6. Contents
  7. Figures
  8. Acknowledgements
  9. Introduction
  10. 1 Language and literary narratives
  11. 2 Blending, narrative spaces, and the emergent story
  12. 3 Stories and their tellers
  13. 4 Viewpoint: representation and compression
  14. 5 Referential expressions and narrative spaces
  15. 6 Fictional minds and embodiment in drama and fiction
  16. 7 Speech and thought in the narrative
  17. 8 Stories in the mind
  18. Notes to the text
  19. References
  20. Literary works cited
  21. Index