Style in Fiction Symposium (SIFS)

• Home
• Programme
• Speakers and Presentations

Elena Semino

Lancaster University, UK

Mind Style 25 years on

Abstract

One of the contributions made by Style in Fiction was to provide a systematic account of the phenomenon of ‘mind style’, which extended the approach originally proposed by Roger Fowler in Linguistics and the Novel (1977). In my talk I will show how subsequent work on mind style has built on the Style in Fiction account, particularly by exploiting new theories and analytical frameworks in order to explain many of the phenomena discussed by Leech and Short. I will begin by pointing out the central role of ‘fictional minds’ in current work in narratology. In particular, I will endorse the claim, made by many scholars, that fictional minds are primarily (although not exclusively) constructed on the basis of what we know about ‘real’ minds, and can be usefully analysed by means of models developed by cognitive psychologists and cognitive scientists. I will then consider the contributions of cognitive theories such as Schema theory, Cognitive Metaphor theory, and Blending theory, and of theories from pragmatics such as Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Politeness theory. I will finish by considering the use of corpus-linguistic techniques to investigate the systematic linguistic patterns that can be responsible for the projection of mind style.