Literary Linguistics

Parallel corpora of literary texts cannot be composed of samples, full texts are preferable. They cannot be collected as synchronic corpora of present-day texts. It might be useful therefore to include the following kinds of data:
    • present-day texts and their translations,
    • old texts and their present-day translations,
    • old texts and their old translations,
    • different texts by the same author and their translations by different translators,
    • different translations of the same texts.
It is also important to include more texts by well-known authors and translators by less known ones.
Compiling corpora along these lines makes the data “skewed”, and the corpus becomes less usable as a whole, i.e. the general statistics only show tendencies. On the other hand, a user can work with subcorpora, which would provide sufficient amount of data of different kinds. A parallel corpus also becomes a sort of searchable archive of translations, which is useful for practical translation work.

Why is the comic-book superhero such a persistent topic of cultural representation?  Citing Denis Dutton’s evolutionary aesthetic, we argue that comic-book superheroes persist because they offer a cultural means of negotiating the gap between the small group size that human beings have evolved a cognitive architecture to deal with, and the much larger group size that is entailed by modern social arrangements.  This position implies four predictions: the superhero should (1) exhibit punitive prosociality, (2) be supernatural or quasi-supernatural, (3) be minimally counterintuitive and (4) display kin-signalling proxies.  These predictions are tested against seventeen superhero figures from various comic-book universes.

Вводится понятие бистабильного текста-по аналогии с понятием бистабильных изображений в когнитивной психологии. Бистабильные тексты-это тексты, которые могут одновременно прочитываться в двух или нескольких не пересекающихся смысловых планах. Для таких текстов характерна не много-значность, а четкая разделенность двух независимо существующих интерпрета-ций, каждая из которых равноправна и независима, когда актуализирована в соз-нании. Для бистабильных текстов, как и для бистабильных изображений, характерны эксклюзивность, неизбежность и случайность. В качестве примера бистабильного текста в статье анализируется стихотворение Владимира Строчко-ва «Последнее дело». Ключевые слова: когнитивная поэтика, бистабильность, бистабильный текст, многозначность. УДК 82-1/-9 Контактная информация: Ахапкин Денис Николаевич, кандидат филологиче-ских наук, доцент кафедры междисциплинарных исследований в области языков и литературы СПбГУ (Галерная ул., 58-60, Санкт-Петербург, 190000, Россия, d_akhapkin@spbu.ru) * Работа выполнена в рамках НИР СПбГУ «Русская формальная школа об особенно-стях восприятия текста: актуальность научного наследия», ID 37592584.

This article analyzes the representation of linguistic variation in the Finnish translations of four Swedish coming-of-age stories depicting migrant or minority perspectives: Mikael Niemi’s 2000 Popular Music from Vittula, Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s 2003 Ett öga rött, Marjaneh Bakhtiari’s 2005 Kalla det vad fan du vill, and Susanna Alakoski’s 2006 Svinalängorna. Through an analysis of speech and thought representation techniques and focalization, the article explores the role played by literature and translation in the materialization of dialects and sociolects as bounded entities. The paper argues that linguistic and social hybridity, on which the reception of minority and migrant literatures often focuses, is accompanied by the reification of new varieties conceived as authentic expressions of migrant and minority experience. Literature and translation are active agents in such processes, which are largely based on cultural, discursive, and cognitive constraints that condition the interpretation of each text.

Media discourse is changing at an unprecedented rate. This book presents the most recent stylistic frameworks exploring different and changed forms of media. The volume collates recent and emerging research in the expanding field of media stylistics, featuring a variety of methods, multimodal source material, and a broad range of topics. From Twitter and Zooniverse to Twilight and Mommy Blogs, the volume maps out new intellectual territory and showcases a huge scope, neatly drawn together by leading scholars Helen Ringrow and Stephen Pihlaja.

Contributors write on topics that challenge the traditional notions and conceptualisations of "media" and the consequences of technological affordances for the development of media production and consumption. There is a particular focus on the ways in which contemporary media contexts complicate and challenge traditional media models, and offer new and unique ways of approaching discourse in these contexts.

Rohinton Mistry's “The Ghost of Firozsha Baag”  as disruptive and cohesive influence in postcolonial Indian writing. 

Rohinton Mistry is an expatriate Parsi Indian writer who has lived in Canada for more than thirty years and who has within the past twenty years developed a reputation as one of the influential postcolonial voices in Indian fiction.  Often compared to the realist novelists in the 19th century, his writing is known for its power of description, its quietist prose, and its attention to the quotidian details of the alienated Parsi community in India.  He is been criticized by one scholar for not “getting beyond the particulars” to develop any kind of ideological point of view.  In this paper the author has tried to show that ideology is implicit in the point of view of the narrator, and thus the writer.  Through an exploration of point of view in light of postcolonial literary theory the author of this paper reveals Mistry as a writer with contradictory ideological aims however subtle this ideology manifests itself in the  “The Ghosts of Firozsha Baag,” Mistry’s masterpiece of subalternity.

This paper uses literary linguistics to analyze how point of view reveals contradictory political views of Rohinton Mistry.  Paul Simpson's linguistic theory from his book Language, Ideology and Point of View is used as a framework  to explore perspective. 

Not much had been written about Rohinton Mistry's work at the time of publication so this paper is an important contribution to postcolonial literary studies.

Stylistics, at its early stage of development, had gone through a number of controversies. The arguments as to whether it was a linguistic or literary phenomenon provided the platform for these controversies. Literary critics were sceptical about the utility of linguistic methods to literary interpretation and criticised the so called ‘objective’ and ‘scientific’ approach employed by linguists in their analysis of literary texts. The linguists, on the other hand, had accused the literary critics of being too vague and subjective in their interpretation and analysis; an issue which has since been seriously debated by both the stylisticians and literary critics. Efforts to bring such a dispute to terms had culminated into the convergence of different theories and approaches, which also marked the development of modern stylistics as an interdisciplinary field. This paper attempts to review the various developments that have taken place in the field of stylistics, as well as the sub-disciplines that have evolved as a result of its eclecticism, and argues that stylistics is indeed an essential tool for literary analysis.

Roland Barthes’s vast array of literary and cultural criticism offers contemporary exegetes a tempting buffet of postures and critical lenses. His sprawling corpus and challenging terminology render him difficult to categorize within the conventional schema used for the development of critical idioms. It is the intention of this chapter to provide an introduction to Barthes’s life and thought for practitioners of biblical studies. Accordingly, it will begin with a survey of Barthes’s historical and intellectual context. Next, it will proceed to an exposition of the methodologies and underlying worldviews he subscribed to over time. Finally, it will cover an example of Barthes’s own interpretation of the Bible (specifically, Acts 10–11), with an eye to comparing his procedures and conclusions to those of more conventional scholarship, as well as discerning the possible shortcomings or insights his work may continue to generate.

Formarea normelor unice ale românei literare a presupus un proces istoric de dezvoltare a limbii, în strânsă legătură cu evoluția societății și contextul socio-politic al provinciilor istorice. Centralizarea politică s-a produs târziu, după unirea țărilor românești, iar diversele regiuni au dus multă vreme o viață autonomă. Subdialectul muntean, a întâmpinat rezistență din partea celorlalte variante cultivate românești şi nu le-a eliminat, fiecare aducându-și contribuția la constituirea limbii române literare unice. În aceste împrejurări, credem că au dreptate cei care susțin că până înspre sfârșitul secolului al XIX-lea, româna cultă a avut mai multe variante regionale, caracterizate prin norme fonetice, gramaticale şi lexicale specifice.
Deși n-a avut ponderea celorlalte variante literare în procesul de cultivare a limbii române, credem că dialectul literar bănățean nu numai că a existat şi a funcţionat ca un instrument elevat de comunicare scrisă şi orală în zona de sud-vest a teritoriului românesc, dar a avut şi perioade în care a contribuit la procesul de formare a limbii române literare: în secolul al XVI-lea a avut un rol important în emanciparea limbii române de sub tutela slavonei cărturărești, iar după 1780, prin scrierile filologice şi literare ale bănăţenilor a contribuit, alături de celelalte variante cultivate, la crearea limbii române literare moderne unice şi unitare.
În lucrarea noastră am dorit să evidențiem trăsăturile specifice dialectului literar bănățean, ca realizare regională a limbii române literare. Am avut în vedere, îndeosebi, perioada de la hotarele epocilor, anume cea premodernă (1780-1840), când s-au tipărit cele mai multe cărți ale dialectului literar bănățean şi, în același timp, a avut loc o „regionalizare” a acestei variante literare, prin exercitarea unei presiuni a graiului asupra normelor (comune / divergente) anterior consolidate. Structura cărții cuprinde următoarele capitole:  Argument, I. Unitate şi diversitate în structura limbii române culte. Privire diacronică, II. Elemente structurale ale dialectului literar bănățean, provenite din subdialectul bănățean și din celelalte variante literare regionale dacoromâneşti, III. Elemente lexicale culte specifice dialectului literar bănăţean, Concluzii, Abrevieri /Sigle şi abrevieri bibliografice, Bibliografie. Pentru o ilustrare a caracteristicilor dialectului literar bănățean am studiat și analizat conținutul, cu precădere, a trei opere, pe care le-am considerat reprezentative pentru scopul nostru și pe care le-am „radiografiat” până la cele mai mici detalii, din punct de vedere fonetic, morfologic și mai ales lexical. Este vorba de: Paul Iorgovici, Observații de limba rumânească, Buda, 1799; N. Stoica de Haţeg, Cronica Banatului, manuscris apreciat ca datând din anii 1825-1827; C. D. Loga, Epistolariul romanesc[…], Buda, 1841.

Mulțumim referenților științifici de al cărui sprijin ne-am bucurat în demersul publicării textului: prof. univ. dr. Vasile Frățilă (coordonatorul tezei noastre de doctorat), prof. univ. Doina Bogdan Dascălu, prof. univ. dr. Ioan David, editorul nostru prin cotutela editorială.

Today we regard cryptology, the mathematical and technical science of ciphers and codes, and philology, the humanistic study of natural or human languages and documents, as separate domains of activity. But the contiguity, even intimacy of these two domains is a historical fact with an institutional history. From the earliest documented techniques for the statistical analysis of text and experiments with mechanized literary analysis, to electromechanical and electronic code-breaking and machine translation, early literary data processing, and the computational philology of late twentieth-century humanities computing and early twenty-first-century “digital humanities,” what I call cryptophilology has flourished alongside imperial jingoism and war — and occasionally served them. In this book I argue that while computing’s humanistic applications are as every bit as historically important as its mathematical and technical origins, they are no less marked and no less constrained by the priorities of national security agencies and institutions devoted to both offensive signals intelligence and mass surveillance — and that our hope for human progress must be tempered by that, so far as even (or especially) in modern democracies, the proliferation of security institutions and the scale of their operations can be justified only by and through programmatically sustained insecurity.

Abstract

The linguistic study of African literary texts has become a fertile ground for researchers in both Applied Linguistics and Literary Studies. This study applies transitivity in analysing the narrative style adopted in a key passage in Ngugi’s Weep Not, Child. The study reveals that the transitivity patterns in which the happenings, actions and inactions of characters are inscribed function to determine the psychological viewpoint from which the narrator relates the story. Specifically, it argues that the writer tends to absolve victimisers from the responsibility for their actions in order to focus readers’ attention on the victims of the political conflict presented in the novel. This stylistic strategy foregrounds the universal theme of suffering in the novel. The study has implications for explorations on the interface between language and literature and further research.

Keywords: Transitivity, narrative viewpoint,stylistics, colonial literature

Jane Eyre has been deemed the masterpiece of Charlotte Brontë's autobiography as well as its narrative method has been widely recognized as the first-person point of view. All scenarios and simulated occurrences are flashbacked through Jane's individual worldview and perception. Based on textual analysis, this paper attempts to offer a fresh perspective of Jane Eyre's literary implication, pointing on the process of the narrative that specifically conveys 'suspense' to the implied reader. This paper will employ Simpson's (1993) stylistic framework of narrative point of view and the discussion of Leech and Short's (1981) model of discourse representation to illustrate how immediacy of suspense is echoed through the readers. Though the whole story is narrated through the protagonist's singular viewpoint, this paper concludes that the narrative is enthralling and spontaneous and that it persuades readers to identify with the protagonist.

Despite the increasing interest in textual structure and the specific use of linguistic means in narratives, the concept of Narration has so far not been an issue of theoretical concern within linguistics and has been rather used than defined or problematized. In this respect, the chapter aims at a closer look at the concept of Narration itself. Starting point is the basic assumption that the analysis of Free Indirect Discourse (FID) – a phenomenon which seems to be restricted to Narration only – will offer insights with respect to characteristics of the underlying narrative structure when read “against the grain”. In this regard, the alignment of formal approaches of context shift and cognitive approaches of perspectivization leads to the conclusion that the narratological differentiation between narrator and character can be seen as a projection of the grammatical differentiation between speaker vs. observer, which is reflected on the different linguistic levels in a recursive manner. In consequence, it is argued that it is the complex unfolding of different layers of discourse that allows for poly-perspectival resp. metarepresentational effects on the textual macro-structure and hence constitutes a core characteristic of Narration. Against this background, the proposed model is not only able to align micro- and macro-structural accounts of Narration, but also allows for a new perspective on the specific use of grammatical means in narrative discourse mode. In this respect, it will become clear that Narration does indeed matter for linguistics.

This dissertation, submitted in 2013 towards an MA in Literary Linguistics from the University of Nottingham, focuses on the application of the cognitive poetic framework of Text World Theory to the postmodernist short story ‘Matinée’ by Robert Coover. First taking a micro-analytical approach, it identifies the complex text world makeup of a section of the text which would, from a structuralist narratological position, be more simplistically described in terms of ‘levels’ or ‘frames’, revealing how one such level/frame is able to appear more ‘real’ than another. It then highlights the importance of accessibility relations in determining the ontological status of text worlds, and looks at how ambiguous focalization and the destabilisation of the narrator’s authority both severely attenuate the concept of accessibility. Moving on to a macro-analytical approach, this dissertation identifies the overarching ontological structure established by the text and explores the subsequent breakdown of this structure, which, it suggests, is aided by the aforementioned weakening of accessibility relations. Finally, this is tied into the postmodernist concept of the ‘ontological imperative’ (Bukatman, 2002, p. 162), and it is concluded that ‘Matinée’, as a postmodernist text, inscribes within itself an ontological distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’, only to reveal the arbitrariness of that distinction.

The deadline for submitting papers for the next issue of Palimpsest is 25 March 2022.
Palimpsest is an international journal for linguistic, literary and cultural research founded at the Faculty of Philology in Stip (Republic of Macedonia) in 2016. It is published in printed form and electronically twice a year, the first issue in May and the second one in November.
The journal publishes papers in the area of linguistics, literary science, teaching methodology and culturology. In addition, there is a section reserved for reviews of books, monographs, and other publications in the sphere of philology and culturology. The international journal Palimpsest publishes papers in the following languages: Macedonian, English, Russian, German, Italian, French and Turkish.
All papers are double-blind peer-reviewed by two independent reviewers prior to being accepted for publication.

Palimpsest is an international journal for linguistic, literary and cultural research founded at the Faculty of Philology in Stip in 2016. It is published in printed form and electronically twice a year, the first issue in May and the second one in November.
The journal publishes papers in the area of linguistics, literary science, teaching methodology and culturology. In addition, there is a section reserved for reviews of books, monographs, and other publications in the sphere of philology and culturology. The international journal Palimpsest publishes papers in the following languages: Macedonian, English, Russian, German, Italian, French and Turkish.
All papers are double-blind peer-reviewed by two independent reviewers prior to being accepted for publication.

The chapter explores cross-overs through the border between Heaven and the created world as represented in Old English poetry in theological context of the period. Next to physical messengers, and signs and portents within this world, other visions open the skies to give sight of heaven itself. Central to the manifestation of the divine is the splendorous wuldor, the essence of the theology of light.

This dissertation is a study of the lexical representation of gender in two contrastive Shakespearean plays to identify ways that gender is represented in Early Modern literary language. I ask if the lexical representation of binary gender features in these two plays match our expectations based on social and literary understandings of the period. Social roles for men and women are often pre-determined in the Early Modern period, and literary critics base their analysis upon these assumptions. I suggest representations of men and women are dependent upon underlying linguistic structures and patterns that are widely ignored in a literary analysis of a text. Macbeth focuses on issues of masculinity; it is contrasted with The Merry Wives of Windsor, a play centered on its female characters.

I conduct three analyses: first, I investigate whether male pronouns are more likely to appear in a subject, rather than object position; I also ask if the feminist literary critics are correct in assuming that women are more likely to appear as objects. I then conduct a close reading of possessive structures using specific lexical clusters (his/her + noun) as they appear in the texts of the plays. I compile three separate corpus linguistic tools based on their strengths - a statistical analysis, a simple concordance compiler, and a distributional analysis – to identify and isolate these patterns in the Early Modern Period, presented in a literary-linguistic context.

Gender representation can be visibly patterned. An analysis of these results shows that linguistic representations of men and women in these plays are not consistent with a literary critic’s understanding of gender in the texts. I argue against the consideration of literary texts as a social reality; instead I combine corpus linguistics methodology with a stylistic, critical discourse approach to literary features gender as presented by the plays.

Text World Theory provides a framework for considering how we conceptualise video game worlds. Text World Theory uses the ‘worlds’ metaphor to describe how we visualise discourse in our minds.

This dissertation explores the ways players build text worlds from the discourse of the game BioShock Infinite. It also uses Gerrig’s metaphor of transportation when considering the conceptualisation of text worlds in the game, which is closely related to the idea of immersion.  This dissertation will explore the relationship between building text worlds and the feeling of immersion.

Firstly, it will use stylistic analysis to identify features within the game discourse that point towards world-building properties as stated by the Text World Theory framework. Here, it identifies that hypothetical text worlds are built by deictic language, but non-hypothetical text worlds are aided considerably by multimodal features of the game, such as visual information. It also identifies problems in determining the accessibility of the game, i.e. the significance of the protagonist as a first person narrator versus our access to visual information, which could impact the way we build text worlds. The dissertation then uses ethnographic data of gaming reviews and articles as a resource of player response, using a corpus linguistic method and subsequent stylistic analysis to determine the significance of those responses.

Seeking evidence of immersion and engagement with language relevant to Text World Theory, it will conclude that players regularly describe immersive experiences in their response to BioShock Infinite. Their use of the words ‘world’, ‘story’ and ‘lost’ particularly support the stylistic analysis which identified the creation of hypothetical text worlds, and ultimately support that players describe an immersive experience through a metaphor of transportation.

Overall, this dissertation shows that video game worlds raise new questions for the conceptualisation of fictional worlds, opening a door to further research.

La "revolución cognitiva" propició el surgimiento de distintas líneas de abordaje a la literatura. Estas conforman campos teóricos de indagación paulatinamente más sistemáticos: estilística cognitiva, lingüística cognitiva literaria, estudios literarios cognitivos, ciencia cognitiva de la literatura, poética cognitiva, retórica cognitiva y neuroestética. Este trabajo esboza un panorama de estos desarrollos, delineando coincidencias y divergencias. Particularmente, presenta una aproxi-mación a los principios epistemológicos y a los objetivos de la poética cognitiva. Concebida en el sentido de poiesis ('creación' o 'producción'), configura un avance radical en la interdisciplinariedad. Persigue el doble propósito de dilucidar los procesos cognitivos que operan en la creatividad humana para dar cuenta de sus productos como totalidades gestálticas, y de cómo es que la creatividad estética puede iluminar el funcionamiento del lenguaje y de la cognición humana. Palabras clave: lingüística; estilística; teoría literaria; interdisciplinariedad; literatura.

Ausgangspunkt des Beitrags bildet die These, dass es sich beim Epischen Präteritum (EP) und Historischen Präsens (HP) um zwei komplementäre Perspektivierungsstrukturen handelt, deren Funktionen in literarischen Texten nur vor dem Hintergrund einer linguistisch fundierten Tempus-Theorie adäquat beschrieben werden können. Vor diesem Hintergrund liefert der Artikel eine grundlegende Klassifikation der Phänomene, die unter der Bezeichnung HP und EP diskutiert werden, und exemplifiziert deren Funktionen an konkreten Beispielen.

In this article the academic and literary genres of the writer Joan Hambidge is researched by means of a linguistic analysis in order to describe the lingual liminal space of her idiolect. To this end, two novels and a PhD thesis were used a central text. From the literature the unique voice of Hambidge is evident. The concepts of genre and liminality were relevant to this study from a theoretical framework. The stylometric analysis, where certain parts of speech and readability was investigated, as well as the more qualitative stylistic analysis proved the liminality between the academic and literary writing style of the author. The writer consistently uses language in the academic text which would be expected in a literary text. The use of prepositions and discourse markers correspond in a statistically significant manner between the two novels. However, the use of prepositions and discourse markers does not agree significantly when the PhD and the two novels are compared. But the use of prepositions and discourse markers diff er between die PhD and the two novels. In terms of pronouns the use is consistent over the text. Especially on a stylistic level the informal and references to the external the academic text becomes unique and it could be considered to be an academic meta-novel.

This article discusses ways that dramatic structure can be analyzed through the use of social titles in Shakespeare's plays. Freytag's (1863) pyramid of dramatic structure is based on patterns he found in Shakespearean and Greek tragedy; more recently, computational methods are being employed to model narrative structure at scale. However, there has not yet been a study which discusses whether or not specific lexical items can be indicative of dramatic structure. Using Shakespeare's plays as an example, this essay fills the gap by observing how social titles can be used to explore the viability of narrative structure. The nineteenth-century playwright, Gustav Freytag, argues that a clear division of action exists across the five acts from Shakespearean and Greek tragedy, based on repeated close readings of dramatic writing. 1 In this essay, I ask if this theory of dramatic structure can be tracked or otherwise measured using linguistic evidence. Focusing my attention on the linguistic class of vocatives, which include status terms (your majesty, madam, sir) to identify specific features of social identity, I hypothesize that the evocation of social class through the use of social referents paired with a name may regularly cluster around specific moments and aid in the construction of narrative, such as through act and scene divisions. 2 In this essay I test this assumption by observing simple frequencies at scale: I trace how the use of vocatives for social status are used in a bigram with a name occur in the whole of Shakespeare's plays and subsequently by genre (following conventions laid out by the First Folio). This essay begins by describing Freytag's approach to dramatic structure, then discusses why the identification of class status can be a useful model for thinking about how to identify specific moments in narrative structure where status is explicitly mentioned. In section 3, I suggest that vocatives as ways of linguistically

Deixis is the semiotic term for particularized space and time in embodied existence. This ever-present deictic field is both ordinary and unexplainable: how is it that this space and this body exist in this moment? The elemental semiotic function of calling attention to particulars from the perspectival orientation of a bodily self in time and space foregrounds such ineluctable properties as presence, immediacy, and the vulnerability of being, and is a central topic for philosophers, linguists, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and literary theorists. Deixis is emerging as critical to foundational theory of the humanities and cognitive science, and the deictic imaginary is of particular significance to theories of literature and art.

The present study investigates the representation of non-standardised varieties of English in literary prose texts. This is achieved by creating and annotating a corpus of literary texts from Scotland, West Africa, and Southeast Asia. The analysis addresses two major topics. Firstly, the extent of representation reveals clearly distinct feature profiles across regions, coupled with varying feature densities. Feature profiles are also relevant to individual characters, as certain traits such as social status, ethnicity, or age can be signalled by linguistic means. The second topic, accuracy of representation, compares the features observed in literary texts with descriptions of the actual varieties, and suggests that representations of varieties may differ from their real-life models in the sense that highly frequent features may be absent from texts, while less frequent but more emblematic ones, or even invented ones, may be used by authors to render a variety of English in their texts.