n d

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Museum, armory, art….
 Agenda
• Lecture 8-9. Representing Speech and Thought. Cognitive Stylistics.
Conceptual Metaphor
• Warm-up: Is the presentation of speech and thought is straightforward?
• Theory: Peter Stockwell’s Cognitive stylistics. Cognition and style. The
spread of cognitive poetics. Key areas in cognitive stylistics. Figure and
ground. Prototypicality. Metaphor and framing. Text worlds. Cognitive
models in and for stylistic analysis.
• Group Discussion. Case study. The bigger picture: seeing transitions
between speech and thought.
• Summary. Systematizing theory.
 2 Levels
• COGNITIVE
• KEY WORDS: MENTAL, TEXTUAL
WORLDS, THOUGHTS,
SCHEMAS, SCENES, FRAMES
• VERBAL
• KEY WORDS: SEMANTIC,
SEMASIOLOGY, EMS&SDS,
SUBSTITUTION,
COMBINATION, OPPOSITION…
http://grammar.about.com/od/basicsentencegrammar/a/tengrammarty
pes.htm
 Cognitive Linguistics
• A cluster of overlapping approaches to the study of language as a mental
phenomenon. Cognitive linguistics emerged as a school of linguistic thought in
the 1970s.
• "Language offers a window into cognitive function, providing insights into the
nature, structure and organization of thoughts and ideas. The most important
way in which cognitive linguistics differs from other approaches to the study of
language, then, is that language is assumed to reflect certain fundamental
properties and design features of the human mind."
(Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green, Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction.
Routledge, 2006).
• http://grammar.about.com/od/basicsentencegrammar/a/tengrammartypes.htm
 Areas of study
• Cognitive linguistics is divided into three main areas of study:
• Cognitive semantics, dealing mainly with lexical semantics, separating
semantics (meaning) into meaning-construction and knowledge
representation.
• Cognitive approaches to grammar, dealing mainly with syntax,
morphology and other traditionally more grammar-oriented areas.
• Cognitive phonology, dealing with classification of various
correspondences between morphemes and phonetic sequences.
 Aspects of cognition
• Construction grammar and cognitive grammar.
• Conceptual metaphor and conceptual blending.
• Image schemas and force dynamics.
• Conceptual organization: Categorization, Metonymy, Frame semantics, and Iconicity.
• Construal and Subjectivity.
• Gesture and sign language.
• Linguistic relativity.
• Cultural linguistics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_linguistics
 Historical Background
• Cognitive Linguistics grew out of the work of a number of researchers
active in the 1970s who were interested in the relation of language
and mind, and who did not follow the prevailing tendency to explain
linguistic patterns by means of appeals to structural properties
internal to and specific to language.
• The scope of the studies are the cognitive principles and mechanisms
not specific to language, including principles of human categorization;
pragmatic and interactional principles; and functional principles in
general, such as iconicity and economy.
 Linguists
• The most influential linguists working along these lines and
focusing centrally on cognitive principles and organization were
Charles Fillmore, George Lakoff, Ronald Langacker, and Leonard
Talmy.

• These views were in direct opposition to the ideas developing at

the time within Chomskyan linguistics, in which meaning was
'interpretive' and peripheral to the study of language. The central
object of interest in language was syntax. The structures of
language were in this view not driven by meaning, but instead
were governed by principles essentially independent of meaning.
• (But let him personally tell you how the things started
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eu-9rpJITY8
•
 Reference
• By the late 1980s, the kinds of linguistic theory development
being done in particular by Fillmore, Lakoff, Langacker, and
Talmy, although appearing radically different in the
descriptive mechanisms proposed, could be seen to be
related in fundamental ways. Fillmore's ideas had developed
into Frame Semantics and, in collaboration with others,
Construction Grammar (Fillmore et al. 1988).
• Lakoff was well-known for his work on metaphor and metonymy (Lakoff
1981 and Lakoff 1987). Langacker's ideas had evolved into an explicit
theory known first as Space Grammar and then Cognitive Grammar
(Langacker 1988). Talmy had published a number of increasingly influential
papers on linguistic imaging systems (Talmy 1985a,b and 1988).
• Also by this time, Gilles Fauconnier had developed a theory of Mental
Spaces, influenced by the views of Oswald Ducrot. This theory was later
developed in collaboration with Mark Turner into a theory of Conceptual
Blending, which meshes in interesting ways with both Langacker's
Cognitive Grammar and Lakoff's theory of Metaphor.
• http://www.cognitivelinguistics.org/en/about-cognitive-linguistics
• Cognitive linguistics, more than generative linguistics, seeks to
mesh together these findings into a coherent whole. A further
complication arises because the terminology of cognitive
linguistics is not entirely stable, both because it is a relatively new
field and because it interfaces with a number of other disciplines.
• Insights and developments from cognitive linguistics are becoming
accepted ways of analysing literary texts, too. Cognitive Poetics, as
it has become known, has become an important part of modern
stylistics.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_linguistics
 Cognitive Stylistics
• Cognitive poetics is a school of literary criticism that applies the principles of
cognitive science, particularly cognitive psychology, to the interpretation of
literary texts. It has ties to reader-response criticism, and is also closely
related to stylistics, whose application to literary study has been most
popular in continental Europe. Like the New Critics, cognitive poetics engages
in close analysis of the text, but it recognizes that context has an important
role to play in the creation of meaning.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_poetics
• Further readings:
• PAUL SIMPSON. STYLISTICS. A resource book for students. Second edition
(A: 10 Cognitive Stylistics; B Developments in Cognitive Stylistics
 Cognitive
• Cognition and style stylistics
• “When stylisticians of literature talk about ‘style’,
they have traditionally referred to the textual
Peter
patterns that are the result of choices made by
writers. The creativity of the author has largely
Stockwell
not been a direct concern; instead, authorial
creativity has been regarded simply as the
motivating force that produced the text. And it is
the text itself that has been the focus of analysis
and interest. At the same time, stylisticians have
traditionally focused on the text as the location
for meaning and aesthetic form, with the
observing reader being regarded merely as the
place where the effects of meaning, emotion, or
evaluation happened. The creativity of the reader
has not really been a direct matter for analysis
either.”
The spread of cognitive
poetics
Although it could be argued that the tradition of
applying our latest best understanding of language and
mind to literature has its origins in ancient classical
rhetoric, the current manifestation of the phenomenon
has its origins in Tsur’s cognitive poetics of the 1970s.
Tsur (1987, 1992) pioneered an account of literary
meaning and effect that treated linguistic patterns as
correlates of human cognition, and drew on
neuropsychology, as well as stylistics and literary theory.
All of these disciplines offered a systematic means of exploring
apparent intention, nonliteral meaning, inference and implication,
ideology and cultural setting, and a rigorous account of context.
Crucially, it became obvious that literary meaning and aesthetic effects
in language could be properly addressed only by considering whole
texts, and involving the dispositions and knowledge that readers
brought to the experience. Stylistics began to draw on empirical studies
in psychology and social science in general, in order to explore readers
and reading. (See Carter & Stockwell, 2008, for a historical survey.)
At the same time, a parallel movement within theoretical linguistics
was emerging, with a similar dissatisfaction for formalist approaches to
language. The efforts in the 1970s to develop artificial intelligence and
machine language had directed researchers towards the understanding
that schematic knowledge and idealised models of the world needed to
be part of a linguistic account. A computer program needed to have a
contextual experience of its world in order to be able to produce and
understand utterances that had not been programmed in literally –
which revelation brought creativity to the fore.
• Different models for understanding this readerly knowledge were
developed, as scenarios, scripts, schemas, macrostructures, and
frames – all essentially trying to describe the same observed
phenomenon. Also within language study, a cognitive linguistics was
emerging that aimed at describing language with the language-user in
context as the focus of the account. Influential work connecting
linguistic form and mental faculty appeared in the study of metaphor
(Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980).
• By the turn of the century, there was a large body of work that could
be gathered together as a broadly common cognitive scientific
approach to literary description. Generally, this has been called
‘cognitive poetics’, widening Tsur’s original coinage to include
schematic and cognitive linguistic developments (Gavins & Steen,
2003; Stockwell, 2002). Where there has been a particularly text-
based focus in the analysis, the approach has more often been called
‘cognitive stylistics’ (Semino & Culpeper, 2002). Where there has been
less textual focus and more thematic concerns, a broad ‘cognitive
literary studies’ can be discerned (Jaén & Simon, 2012; Zunshine,
2010, 2015).
• What all of these associated approaches have in common is a concern to
account for literature as a natural human capacity, and for reading as an
activity that can be understood and explained in a disciplined way.
• For cognitive stylistics researchers, style is the creative choice of an
author, drawing upon the capacities that language affords and constrains.
Drawing on those same language capacities, and sharing what might
broadly be called their human condition, readers also engage in creative
reconstruction and imaginative construction when reading literature.
• Cognitive stylistics or cognitive poetics is thus centrally and inherently a
discipline that explores literary creativity in all its aspects.
Key areas in cognitive stylistics
• Language is not a separate part of human experience, but is fundamental to it. Language is therefore
natural in origin, rather than artificial, or technological, or part of culture; these aspects emerged
interconnectedly and later.
• Language is embodied in the sense that much of it is dependent on the fact that we all basically
share the same human shape, condition, and experience. So it is not surprising when we see common
metaphors or other language structures across the world’slanguages.
• Language is built on, and adapts, our other perceptual faculties, such as sight, sound, touch, taste,
smell, and our sense of physical space and movement. There is no separate ‘language module’ in the
brain. Patterns in language are thus continuous with these other aspects of experience.
• Language includes cognition, perception, memory, anticipation, speculative modelling, social
relationships, meanings, and emotions, and so a disciplined account of it should encompass these
matters as well.
• Language description must include an account not only of the constraints and habitual patterns of
the system, but also of the creative flexibility and imaginative innovation at the centre of language
practice.
Figure and ground
• A fundamental human capacity is our ability to distinguish different
objects in our perception, and to pay attention to one or a single
group of them with more care and intensity than other, backgrounded
objects. This capacity is clearly evident in the visual field, but also in
our ability to filter in and out different sounds, tastes, smells, and
physical textures. We can delineate objects from their backgrounds,
discern nearness and distance, observe and predict spatial
movement, conceptualise one thing being hidden by another thing,
and understand agency when an object acts on another. There are
textual equivalences for all of these figure and ground relationships.
• The ability to foreground a textual element and background the
others is, of course, a matter of the patterning of the text, but it
happens in the mind of a reader only with the 236 involvement of the
reader. The process can be automatic and habituated, whereby a
particular reader simply makes sense of the text and does not notice
certain elements being placed into the foreground of attention.
Alternatively, the process of foregrounding can be increasingly active
and self-aware, as readers notice certain aspects of the text, or are
aware of their own reading process. This can reach its ultimate
expression in a case in which a reader deliberately pays more
attention to parts of the text that appear not to have been stylistically
foregrounded by the author. This sort of resistant, or dispreferred,
reading is an important part of the range of responses available to
literary readers.
• Figure and ground are not simply crucial matters of clausal grammar
that enable cognitive stylisticians to explore prominence, significance,
agency, ambience, and texture in literary works (see Harrison et al.,
2014). The human capacity for attending to one thing in preference to
another operates at every level of cognition. So certain characters
have more prominence or significance than others; certain objects in
a described room, or aspects of an imagined landscape, or certain
striking descriptions in themselves will offer themselves for readerly
figuration. In short, the entire texture of feeling across a literary
reading can be explored and analysed based on figure and ground
descriptions (see Stockwell, 2009).
Prototypicality
• However, it is important to remember that figure and ground are
attentional phenomena: a figure is a thing, but a ground is simply not-
a-thing – that is, you cannot look at, imagine, picture, point at, or be
aware of the ground, because as soon as you do that, it ceases being
backgrounded and becomes a figure in your attention. Figure and
ground are therefore not binary objects, but instead operate along a
scale of attentiveness. The process of reading is online and dynamic,
so a figure at one moment in a text can quickly be occluded by
another and the first object can fade from attention to form part of
the background.
• Such a scaling of attention draws on the cognitive linguistic notion of
prototypicality (see Lakoff, 1987). Simply, this claims that human
categorisation does not operate in terms of absolute category-
membership, but rather in terms of a sort of ‘best fit’ example. In
other words, a poodle is not simply a type of dog, but is a good
example of a dog. For many people, other dogs are more ‘doggy’ than
a poodle, and so are better examples of a dog: a terrier, collie, or
Labrador, perhaps.
• Prototypicality says that every concept is scalable.
Resonance and ambience
• In Langacker’s (2008) approach, clausal elements are understood as items
that are profiled in attention, and the predications that verbs typically enact
are understood as schematic motion. A clause acts like a sort of action chain,
sending energy from the item with agency towards the other participants.
This approach to grammatical form encompasses the creative imagination
that is required of a reader as an inherent part of the theoretical apparatus.
Different readers might construe the same sentence or passage of text in
different ways, because their simulation of the meaning is likely to be
different: they will pay more or less attention to certain elements,
foregrounding some over others, and drawing on their own experience not
only for meaning, but also for the feelings associated with the sense.
• Matters of the perceived atmosphere and tonal qualities of a passage
of literature, for example, are especially difficult to describe precisely
– and yet this literary ambience can be explored in cognitive
grammatical terms (see Deggan, 2013; Stockwell, 2014). The
strikingness of a literary work, its memorability, how it resonates with
your own life in either a phrase, or a powerful image, or how the
voice of a narrator or character has an emotional impact: all of these
common literary experiences can be explored from a cognitive
grammatical perspective.
Metaphor and framing
• Cognitive stylistics has maintained a central interest in metaphor from
its inception as a discipline. Metaphor in cognitive linguistics is not
only the textual realisation of a rhetorical trope, but also is treated as
a fundamentally important aspect of human conceptualisation.
• Behind the linguistic metaphor ‘The weight of this sad time we must
obey’ (King Lear) lies a set of conceptual metaphors in which time is
concretised, balanced, and personified, for example. Some of this is
conventional and some is innovative, and together the effect is to
draw the audience into the sense of doom in the last few lines of the
play.
• Metaphors are thus neither simply linguistic forms nor mere
ornamentation in cognitive linguistics, but have been regarded more
importantly as textual manifestations of underlying shared, or
perhaps even universal, properties of human perception. The
cognitive stylistic treatment of conceptual metaphor manages to
capture this balance between the particular stylistic uniqueness of the
expression and its cultural value and wider resonant power (see
Freeman, 1996).
• Metaphors, in this approach, activate domains, or frames, of knowledge and
experience, with the new domain serving creatively to restructure the familiar
domain. So the difficult concept of TIME is understood in terms of the familiar
experience of SPACE, or ETHICS as BALANCE, or BEAUTY as THE SUN, or LIFE
as a JOURNEY, or TIME as MONEY, or IDEAS as BUILDINGS, and so on. These
conventional metaphors are often so familiar that we barely notice them as
metaphors at all, although they tap into a set of ideas and assumptions that
underlie the language of a literary text. Striking and innovative, and deviant
and dissonant, metaphors operate with the same mechanism, but they are
often noticeable and resonant, and involve a greater demand and
engagement of the reader. Such metaphors are often encountered in highly
wrought poetic writing: lyricism, surrealism, imagism, for example.
• A metaphorical practice can become normalised even with a single
text, so that it seems to establish a frame of understanding. For a
reader to engage with the text then involves repeated activation of
that conceptual metaphor, and the framing discourse comes to seem
reasonable and normal. This is a powerful political technique (see
Lakoff, 2002, 2006), but it is also the basis for engaging a reader in a
fictional world.
 COGNITIVE METAPHOR

•
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
(2003) Metaphors we live by.
 Conceptual metaphor
• A conceptual metaphor is a metaphor (or 
figurative comparison) in which one idea
(or conceptual domain) is understood in
terms of another.
• In cognitive linguistics, the conceptual
domain from which we draw metaphorical
Source Domain expressions to understand another
conceptual domain is known as the 
source domain. The conceptual domain that
is understood in this way is the 
target domain. Thus the source domain of
Target Domain the journey is commonly used to explain the
target domain of life.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvocT
KD5o5A&app=desktop
 CLASSIFICATION OF C.M.

Orientational Ontological Conduit

Structural Container
 Concepts We Live By
• Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of
language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or
action. For this reason, most people think they can get along
perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the
contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just
in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary
conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act,
is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.
 Structural metaphor
• A structural metaphor is a metaphorical system in which one complex
concept (typically abstract) is presented in terms of some other
(usually more concrete) concept.
• Structural metaphor is one of the three overlapping categories of 
conceptual metaphors identified by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
in Metaphors We Live By (1980). (The other two categories are 
orientational metaphor and ontological metaphor.) "Each
individual structural metaphor is internally consistent," say Lakoff and
Johnson, and it "imposes a consistent structure on the concept it
structures."
 Examples and Observations

• "ARGUMENT IS WAR is an example of a structural metaphor.

According to Lakoff and Johnson, structural metaphors are 'cases
where one concept is metaphorically structured in terms of another'
(1980/ 2003:14). 
• Source domains provide frameworks for target domains: these
determine the ways in which we think and talk about the entities and
activities to which the target domains refer, and even the ways in
which we behave or carry out activities, as in the case of argument.“
•
(M. Knowles and R. Moon, Introducing Metaphor. Routledge, 2006)
 The War Metaphor

"In the structural metaphor ECONOMIC

ACTIVITY = WAR, concepts from the source
domain WARFARE are transferred to the
target domain, because physical conflict is
ubiquitous in human life and therefore
quite well-structured and more readily
understandable.
It coherently structures the relations
between the various factors in economic
activity: business is war; the economy is a
battlefield; competitors are warriors or even
armies fighting each other, and economic
activities are conceptualized in terms of
attack and defense, as illustrated in the
following example:
As a result of the crisis, the Asians will strike
back; they will launch an export offensive.
(Wall Street Journal, June 22, 1998, 4)
The WAR metaphor is realized in the following
schemata: ATTACK and DEFENSE as causes and
WIN/LOSE as the result: successful attack and
defense result in victory; unsuccessful attack
and defense result in loss . . .."
(Susanne Richardt, "Expert and Common-Sense
Reasoning." Text, Context, Concepts, ed. by C.
Zelinsky-Wibbelt. Walter de Gruyter, 2003
https://www.thoughtco.com/structural-metaphor-1692146\
 Ontological metaphor
• "Ontological metaphors serve various purposes,
and the various kinds of metaphors there are
reflect the kinds of purposes served. Take the
experience of rising prices, which can be
metaphorically viewed as an entity via the noun
inflation. This gives us a way of referring to the
experience:
 INFLATION IS AN ENTITY

• Inflation is lowering our standard of living.

• If there's much more inflation, we'll never survive.
• We need to combat inflation.
• Inflation is backing us into a corner.
• Inflation is taking its toll at the checkout counter and the gas
pump.
• Buying land is the best way of dealing with inflation.
• Inflation makes me sick.
• In these cases, viewing inflation as an entity allows us
to refer to it, quantify it, identify a particular aspect of
it, see it as a cause, act with respect to it, and perhaps
even believe that we understand it. Ontological
metaphors like this are necessary for even attempting
to deal rationally with our experiences."
• (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By. The
University of Chicago Press, 1980)
 Container Metaphor
•A containment metaphor is an ontological metaphor in which some
concept is represented as: having an inside and outside, and
capable of holding something else.
•Examples:
•I’ve had a full life.
•Life is empty for him.
•Her life is crammed with activities.
•Get the most out of life.
•Source: Lakoff, G. and Johnson 198029–30, 51
•https://glossary.sil.org/term/container-metaphor
 Orientational Metaphor
• An orientational metaphor is a metaphor (or figurative comparison)
that involves spatial relationships (such as UP-DOWN, IN-OUT, ON-
OFF, and FRONT-BACK).
• Orientational metaphor (a figure that "organizes a whole system of
concepts with respect to one another") is one of the three
overlapping categories of conceptual metaphors identified by George
Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By(1980).
Examples

• "All the following concepts are characterized by an 'upward'

orientation, while their 'opposites' receive a 'downward'
orientation.
• MORE IS UP; LESS IS DOWN: Speak up, please. Keep your voice
down, please.
• HEALTHY IS UP; SICK IS DOWN: Lazarus rose from the dead. He fell
ill.
• CONSCIOUS IS UP; UNCONSCIOUS IS DOWN: Wake up. He sank
into a coma.
• CONTROL IS UP; LACK OF CONTROL IS DOWN: I'm on top of the
situation. He is under my control.
 Examples
• HAPPY IS UP; SAD IS DOWN: I'm feeling up today. He's really low these
days.
• VIRTUE IS UP; LACK OF VIRTUE IS DOWN: She's an upstanding citizen.
That was a low-down thing to do.
• RATIONAL IS UP; NONRATIONAL IS DOWN: The discussion fell to an
emotional level. He couldn't rise above his emotions.
• Upward orientation tends to go together with positive evaluation, while
downward orientation with a negative one." (Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor:
A Practical Introduction, 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 2010)
 Conduit metaphor
• A conduit metaphor is a type of 
conceptual metaphor (or figurative comparison)
commonly used in English to talk about the process
of communication.
• The concept of the conduit metaphor was originally
explored by Michael Ready in his 1979 article "The
Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in Our
Language About Language" (see below). Reddy
estimated that the conduit metaphor functions in
roughly 70% of the expressions used to talk about ​
language.
"Typical solutions to the unskilled speaker's
communication problems are illustrated by (4) through (8).

• (4) Whenever you have a good idea practice capturing it in words

• (5) You have to put each concept into words very carefully
• (6) Try to pack more thoughts into fewer words
• (7) Insert those ideas elsewhere in the paragraph
• (8) Don't force your meanings into the wrong words
• Naturally, if language transfers thought to others, then the logical
container, or conveyer, for this thought is words, or word-groupings
like phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and so on. . . .
 Conduit metaphor
• A conduit metaphor is a type of 
conceptual metaphor (or figurative comparison)
commonly used in English to talk about the process
of communication.
• The concept of the conduit metaphor was originally
explored by Michael Ready in his 1979 article "The
Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in Our
Language About Language" (see below). Reddy
estimated that the conduit metaphor functions in
roughly 70% of the expressions used to talk about ​
language.
"Typical solutions to the unskilled speaker's
communication problems are illustrated by (4) through (8).

• (4) Whenever you have a good idea practice capturing it in words

• (5) You have to put each concept into words very carefully
• (6) Try to pack more thoughts into fewer words
• (7) Insert those ideas elsewhere in the paragraph
• (8) Don't force your meanings into the wrong words
• Naturally, if language transfers thought to others, then the logical
container, or conveyer, for this thought is words, or word-groupings
like phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and so on. . . .
 "[F]our categories . . . constitute the 'major framework'
of the conduit metaphor. The core expressions in these
categories imply, respectively, that:
• (1) language functions like a conduit, transferring thoughts bodily from one
person to another;
• (2) in writing and speaking, people insert their thoughts or feelings in the
words;
• (3) words accomplish the transfer by containing the thoughts or feelings
and conveying them to others; and
• (4) in listening or reading, people extract the thoughts and feelings once
again from the words."
• (Michael J. Reddy, "The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in Our
Language About Language." Metaphor and Thought, ed. by Andrew Ortony.
Cambridge University Press, 1979)
 General conclusions
• Conceptual metaphors are seen in language in our everyday lives. Conceptual
metaphors shape not just our communication, but also shape the way we think
and act. In George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's work, Metaphors We Live
By (1980), we see how everyday language is filled with metaphors we may not
always notice. An example of one of the commonly used conceptual metaphors is
"argument is war".[4] This metaphor shapes our language in the way we view
argument as war or as a battle to be won. It is not uncommon to hear someone
say "He won that argument" or "I attacked every weak point in his argument".
The very way argument is thought of is shaped by this metaphor of arguments
being war and battles that must be won. Argument can be seen in other ways
than a battle, but we use this concept to shape the way we think of argument and
the way we go about arguing.
 General conclusions
• Conceptual metaphors are used very often to understand theories
and models. A conceptual metaphor uses one idea and links it to
another to better understand something. For example, the conceptual
metaphor of viewing communication as a conduit is one large theory
explained with a metaphor. So not only is our everyday
communication shaped by the language of conceptual metaphors, but
so is the very way we understand scholarly theories. These metaphors
are prevalent in communication and we do not just use them in
language; we actually perceive and act in accordance with the
metaphors.
 Discussion and recommended
resources
• 1. http://shu.bg/tadmin/upload/storage/161.pdf
• 2. https://
www.thoughtco.com/what-is-conceptual-metaphor-1689899
• 3. http://elearning.kubg.edu.ua/course/view.php?id=6946
• 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWYaoAoijdQ
Simulation and deictic
projection
• One of the key insights from cognitive science has been that
conceptualising an event or experience, and articulating it, or even
reading about it, seems to activate the same faculties at second-hand
as are exercised during first-hand experience. So the difference
between, say, catching a ball and reading about catching a ball is not
as great as you otherwise might imagine. This also goes for all
activations generated by texts. It seems that we simulate the original
perception offered by a text and recreate it in mind in order to
experience it again (or virtually for the first time) (see Gibbs, 2006).
• Simulation accounts for the counterintuitive phenomenon in which
readers of fictional events are moved emotionally by those events
and the characters’ experiences of them. Literary reading generates a
range of emotions, moods, and other effects that are actual emotions
and moods: we do not feel fictional sadness, or imaginary
melancholy, or pretend laughter during literary experiences.
• In cognitive stylistics, we can trace the close textual patterns that
allow for such experiences, for example by analysing the deictic
aspects of a text. These are all those parts of a text that set out the
different positionings of fictional, narratorial, authorial, and readerly
minds. So, most obviously, the personal pronouns, and the spatial and
temporal aspects of a text, allow a reader to imagine and locate a
particular character’s perspective, and also to establish what his or
her imagined viewpoint is in relation to that deictic centre-point. This
deictic projection is the stylistic means by which a reader can populate
the imagined scene and keep track of all of the people in it.
Text worlds
• The text world that a reader co-creates with an author is not a static
representation, but instead is conceived as a working heuristic tool
that readers use as a fundamental means of reading. I build a world
and use my model to keep track of who is where, who knows what,
who remembers what has happened, what else is in the scene, and so
on. The framework usefully allows us to discuss aspects of fictionality,
plot development, and the landscapes of fictional works in systematic
ways. It allows us to understand how we can hold metaphors,
negations, flashbacks and flashforwards, speculations, and other
unrealised possibilities in our minds as part of the rich texture that we
create as readers of literature.
Mind-modelling
• In all of this process, it is clear that readers imagine versions of
authorial, narratorial, and character minds, and are able to have
relationships with them. This is possible because of our capacity for
mind-modelling – that is, we imagine other people to have a
consciousness like our own, and we fill in further details about their
lives, thoughts, and perspectives. This cognitive poetic account of
characterisation draws on the notions of ‘theory of mind’ and
simulation from cognitive psychology.
• We can imagine their beliefs, feelings, emotions, aspirations, goals,
and so on, on the basis of the text-driven information that we are
given as readers. It should be clear again that any given text cannot
possibly provide all of the denotational information sufficient for the
richly textured sense of character that the vast majority of readers
routinely create in literary reading. Mind-modelling is an active,
creative, and productive process that goes beyond the basic
information of the text.
New territories and directions
for exploration
• Cognitive poetics, or cognitive stylistics,
the associated discipline of cognitive
narratology, and the broader area of
cognitive literary studies are fields still in
their infancy, although they have come a
long way in a short time. Their future
development is tied to two impulses.
• First, there remains a great deal of work to do to apply what we
already know about language and mind to literary writing and
reading. As literary linguists, we have now a reasonably good account
of how meaning is creatively generated by readers during an
encounter with a literary text. We have made good progress in
exploring the aesthetic effects, the emotions, feelings, and
dispositions, which are created within readers by literature. We have
the basis of an understanding of delicate matters of ambience, tone,
and voice. We have even begun to engage with questions of readerly
and authorial ethics from a cognitive narratological perspective. All of
these developments are ongoing, and we can see that they will be
further productive, because we already know about the unmined
work in cognitive science that will allow this work to progress.
• Secondly, there is an impulse from what we do not as yet know.
Cognitive stylistics depends on the evolution of cognitive science, and
as new insights and methods arise in that broad field, so they will be
taken up within cognitive poetics.
 Imagery
• In a literary text an image is understood as a segment of speech that renders not only
logic but also emotional information accumulated through one’s organs of senses. The
meaning of an image as a whole is not equivalent to meanings of its parts.

• But the major role of images (or imagery) is to create a sensory perception of an abstract
notion by arousing certain associations between the general and the particular. Decoding
images is a complicated process which is contingent partially on the objective knowledge
and partially – on your individual associations.
• These too examples are word-images, or microimages. They are also called figures of
speech. A number of them clustered together in one context create macroimages
(metaimages).
 Symbol
• A symbol is a kind of an image implicitly denoting important notions and ideas, such as
love, friendship, happiness, trust, etc. Most symbols created by authors are based on the
ones which are traditional for a given culture and language, or for the whole humanity.
• Literary images are an integral part of the poetic language – the language of fiction
carrying out an aesthetic role, i.e. stimulating and enriching one’s emotional perception
of reality.
• The word rose performs as an image in this context. The object it names – Egbert – is the
tenor. The object it compares Egbert with– the flower – is the vehicle. The similar
qualities of them constitute the ground of this image. What is an image in its stylistic
sense? From the psychological perspective, it is a mental reproduction of the
experienced feelings and perceptions.
Further guidelines:

• PSS: (Paul Simpson. Stylistics. A resource book for students. Routledge. London and New
York. – 262 p.) Section A. Unit 8 p.30, Unit 10 p.38; Section B. Unit 8 p.80, Unit 10 p. 89;
Section C. Unit 8 p. 130, Unit 10 p. 139; Section D Unit 8 p.195, Unit 10 p. 201;
• Katie Wales. A Dictionary of Stylistics. Second Edition. Longman. Pearson Education. –
429 p.;
• P. Stockwell. Cognitive stylistics. in Rodney Jones (ed.) (2015) The Routledge Handbook of
Language and Creativity, London: Routledge https://
www.academia.edu/8764593/Cognitive_stylistics
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_poetics
• http://grammar.about.com/od/basicsentencegrammar/a/tengrammartypes.htm
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_linguistics
• http://www.cognitivelinguistics.org/en/about-cognitive-linguistics