Cognitive Grammar in Stylistics

A Practical Guide

Marcello Giovanelli, Chloe Harrison

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781474298940
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Syntax in Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Cognitive Grammar in Stylistics: A Practical Guide provides an engaging, accessible and practically-focused introduction to cognitive grammar outlining how central principles of the field can be used in stylistic analyses. Assuming no prior knowledge, the book leads students through the basics of cognitive grammar, outlining its place within the field of cognitive linguistics as a whole, providing clear explanations of key principles and concepts. It then explains how these can be used to study a range of literary and non-literary texts. The book argues that cognitive grammar offers a powerful alternative to more traditional grammatical models when analysing texts. Its primary focus is on the practical application of cognitive grammar to examples of language in context and on its potential for both literary and non-literary material. It offers a clear and facilitating approach to allow students to describe language features carefully and to explore how these descriptions can be developed into full and rich analyses. Suitable for undergraduate students taking modules in stylistics, English language, and cognitive linguistics, as well as postgraduates encountering the field for the first time, the book provides a much-needed and essential guide to this exciting subject.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Key objectives

In this chapter we will explore:

• the general aims and principles of stylistics as a discipline;

• the different models of grammars that have been used in stylistics; and

• some overarching principles of cognitive grammar.

1.1 Aims of this book

In this book, we aim to provide an engaging, accessible and practically focused introduction to cognitive grammar in stylistics by demonstrating cognitive grammar’s key principles and concepts, and explaining how these can be used to support stylistic analyses of a range of literary and non-literary texts. In each chapter, we hope to demonstrate that cognitive grammar offers a powerful alternative to more traditional grammatical models in supporting you to critically examine a variety of different text types.

This book is aimed mainly at undergraduates taking courses in English language, linguistics, stylistics or literary studies. Given that courses vary from institution to institution and that students arrive onto programmes with different backgrounds, experience and knowledge, we have assumed no prior knowledge of either linguistics or stylistics. Furthermore, since cognitive grammar is a relatively new method of analysis in stylistics, we provide a step-by-step account both of some of its central premises and concepts and of its potential to help you explore, interpret and evaluate texts. Throughout the book, we therefore take a practical approach, exemplifying cognitive grammar in action and offering activities designed to get you working with and exploring its principles in your own analyses.

1.2 Stylistics

1.2.1 Doing stylistics

As the title of this book suggests, our focus is on outlining cognitive grammar as a method of stylistic practice. Doing stylistics and being a stylistician start from the premise that whenever we read a text, our initial engagement with that text is on a linguistic level. That is, we are responding to the language choices and patterns as an integral part of how we make meaning. An idea central to stylistics, then, is that any analysis we undertake should be grounded in as precise a description and discussion of language as is possible, drawing on the most relevant and up-to-date models and ideas from linguistics to help us to do so. Typically, these can be from a number of different theoretical and methodological positions and may involve examining language at a number of different language levels: lexis, grammar, semantics, phonology, discourse and pragmatics.

There are some important caveats here. First, being a stylistician does not mean simply resorting to labelling and counting up features in a text. Stylistics is not about describing the linguistic properties of a poem or an advertisement or an extract from a novel with little attention to how those features give rise to a particular interpretation. Instead, stylisticians engage with and explicitly identify the readings that emerge from a reader or groups of readers engaging with those linguistic features. They also consider the various contexts in which texts are produced and received as a way of illuminating analysis and discussion. This means that it is perfectly possible, and indeed wholly desirable, for stylistic analyses to draw on biographical, ­historical, cultural and generic factors in conjunction with a close ­language-focused approach.

A second important caveat is centred in the notion of meaning itself. It is important to remember that the linguistic features of any text depend on the wider co-text (the surrounding thematic and structural elements) and the context (how, where and by whom the text is produced and read), which together provide a frame that can afford and/or constrain interpretations. This means that it is theoretically and methodologically impossible to make the claim that a single linguistic feature gives rise to a particular effect in all situations. For example, look at Text 1A, the famous lines from Book One of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude, where the speaker is describing skating at night.

Text 1A

All shod with steel,

We hissed along the polished ice in games

(Wordsworth [1850] 1995)

In these lines, the repetition of the sounds /sh/ and /s/ in ‘shod’, ‘steel’, ‘hissed’, ‘polished’, ‘ice’ and ‘games’ foregrounds and, in this instance, appears to mirror the sound of skates gliding across ice. Reading these lines, it is possible to argue that they evoke a demonstrable effect but it would be wrong to assert that this gliding sound was an attribute independent of the context in which /sh/ and /s/ appear. You can easily prove this by collecting countless examples of where it would be difficult or plain wrong to suggest that these sounds produce the effect of gliding.

1.2.2 Avoiding impressionism

A primary aim for the stylistician, then, is to avoid simple intuitive and impressionistic comments that are not grounded in language and do not draw on a viable set of analytical methods. For example, a recent review in the Sunday Times of Ann Enright’s The Green Road (2016) remarked that the novel was ‘brilliant, glittering fiction’ and that ‘her [Enright’s] gaze is cool, her eye is lethal’. Although such comments might on the surface appear to form a valid analysis, it is actually very difficult to work out exactly what they mean. What, for example, does ‘glittering’ refer to in the context of discussing a literary work? And, to what extent is Enright’s eye ‘lethal’? If we ask these questions, it is easy to see that the comments tell us very little, if anything, about Enright’s style. And, of course, ‘glittering’ and ‘lethal’ can mean different things to different groups of readers. As such, it is hard to pin down anything that can be explored with any reference to a principled set of tools and methods. These kinds of comments are essentially rhetorical and opaque rather than analytical and transparent.

As an antidote to this kind of approach, Paul Simpson (2014a) proposes that the practice of stylistics should conform to what he calls the ‘three R’s’ so as to avoid this kind of intuitive response:

• Stylistic analysis should be rigorous

• Stylistic analysis should be retrievable

• Stylistic analysis should be replicable

(Simpson 2014a: 4)

Simpson argues that being rigorous means that the analysis is founded on an established and explicitly set-out method of analysis. In turn, being retrievable means that any analysis is grounded in a set of terms that are commonly shared and so allow others following the criticism to follow the argument and understand the language points that are being made. Finally, being replicable means that other stylisticians should be able to take the same method and apply it to a text so as to verify the approach taken and vouch for the credibility of an interpretation offered.

In this book, we encourage you to take Simpson’s points seriously as you work with cognitive grammar and apply the model to texts both in the chapters that follow this one and beyond. As Simpson (2014a: 3) also notes, a fortunate empowering consequence of doing stylistics is that you will develop your understanding of the language system itself. Furthermore, stylistics offers the kind of principled parameters that make it possible to explicitly comment on the how of textual interpretation as well as the what, providing a way of what Stanley Fish (1980: 28) calls

slow[ing] down the reading process so that events one does not notice in normal time but which do occur, are brought before our analytical attention. It is as if a slow-motion camera with an automatic stop action effect were recording our linguistic experiences and presenting them to us for viewing.

In this way, stylistics can be fully considered a discipline that integrates linguistic and literary study so as to bring to the surface the benefits of undertaking the analysis of texts through a linguistically informed lens.

Over time, stylisticians have become increasingly more interested in applying models from cognitive linguistics, including cognitive grammar, to their analyses of texts. This has resulted in the emergence of a subdiscipline, cognitive stylistics (or cognitive poetics), which has a strong grounding in cognitive linguistics while maintaining the methodology and central elements of good stylistic analysis (Simpson’s three R’s).

1.3 Grammar

Generally speaking, grammar refers both to the ways in which we structure language and how we talk about those structures. Perhaps, while not many of us would label ourselves as grammar specialists, grammar is nevertheless something that, as language users, we know about intuitively.

Any system of grammar – and there are many different ‘grammars’ – provides a description of how these units or structures work together, and the relationships between them. The majority of theories of grammar are premised on the idea of the linguistic rank scale. This rank scale describes how language can be structured hierarchically, starting with smaller units, such as morphemes, and how these smaller units can be combined in order to create larger units, such as clauses.

Consider, for example, how the following sentence is built up. We can make the word ‘tomcat’ from two different morphemes ‘tom’ and ‘cat’, and ‘cat’ is also a discrete lexical unit in its own right. Adding a definite article creates a phrase (‘the tomcat’), and adding a verb, in turn, introduces an action of some kind which creates a clause, ‘The tomcat sat’, and so on. Here, we are simply stringing together smaller units of language to create a larger one.

There are various ways that we can talk about the rules that govern these structures, and there have been a number of theories of grammar which have brought their own set of terms and ideas.

Morpheme(s)	Tom + cat
Word	Tomcat
Phrase	The tomcat
Clause	The tomcat sat
Sentence	The tomcat sat on the mat

One of the most famous grammars is generative grammar. First developed by Noam Chomsky in the 1950s, generative grammar aims to both reveal principles about language that underpin all natural languages, and describe the laws that structure any given particular language. Generative grammar is further premised on the idea that all humans have an innate ability to process language and grammar, and, that consequently, we can describe some universal principles about how language is structured. While an influential model of grammar, generative grammar is not a favoured method of analysis in stylistics (see Fludernik 1994; Stockwell 2015). This is because it aims to represent a formal model of grammar that is independent from particular discourse contexts.

A grammar that does explore meaning in context, and from a less biologically oriented and more socially oriented perspective, is Michael Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar. Systemic-functional grammar offers a systematic, user-friendly framework for text analysis that is centred on the exploration of interpretative effects – all of which makes it well suited for stylistic analyses. The grammar is largely based on Halliday’s systemic ­grammar (1960s onwards), and ha...