This book aims to provide a new, linguistically grounded typology of speech and thought representation in English on the basis of the systematic study of deictic, syntactic and semantic properties of authentic examples drawn from literary as well as non-literary sources. In the area beyond direct and indirect speech or thought, ‘free indirect discourse’ has often been implicitly treated as a residual category that can accommodate anything that is neither one nor the other. This book takes a fresh look at the evidence in the area of deixis, particularly through a close study of pronoun and proper name use, and proposes to distinguish the more character-oriented free indirect type from a narrator-oriented ‘distancing’ indirect type, which is grammatically wholly structured from the narrator’s deictic standpoint. Unlike free indirect representations, which coherently represent the character’s viewpoint, the distancing indirect type sees narrators appropriating character discourse for their own purposes, which may for instance be ironic. The distinctions thus drawn shed new light on the much debated ‘dual voice’ approach to free indirect discourse. Included in the scope of this book are subjectified uses of clauses such as I think, which no longer primarily construe a cognition process, but rather come to function as hedges. Such speaker-encoding uses are argued to involve an interpersonal type of structure, not based on complementation, whereas the non-subjectified cases receive an interclausal complementation analysis which does not have recourse to the problematic notion of ‘reporting verb’. This monograph is mainly of interest to researchers and graduate students interested in the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of reported speech viewed from a constructional perspective.

Main description: The author argues for a new, linguistically grounded typology of speech and thought representation in English from a cognitive-linguistic perspective. Apart from direct and indirect speech/thought, the types described include the character-oriented free indirect and the narrator-oriented distancing indirect type, and two subjectified types in which reporting clauses such as I think function as hedges.

Narratives enable readers to vividly experience fictional and non-fictional contexts. Writers use a variety of language features to control these experiences: they direct readers in how to construct contexts, how to draw inferences and how to identify the key parts of a story. Writers can skilfully convey physical sensations, prompt emotional states, effect moral responses and even alter the readers' attitudes. Mind, Brain and Narrative examines the psychological and neuroscientific evidence for the mechanisms which underlie narrative comprehension. The authors explore the scientific developments which demonstrate the importance of attention, counterfactuals, depth of processing, perspective and embodiment in these processes. In so doing, this timely, interdisciplinary work provides an integrated account of the research which links psychological mechanisms of language comprehension to humanities work on narrative and style.

This volume explores how speakers and writers mark, structure, and discuss a previous speech event or fictional speech in historical periods. Focusing on the Early Modern English and the Late Modern English periods, the book covers multiple genres including witness depositions, literary texts, letters, histories, and spoken language. The chapters draw on historical sociolinguistics, historical pragmatics, and corpus linguistics to show a wide array of approaches to the study of speech representation in the history of English.

This book is a state-of-the-art overview of English historical pragmatics, covering a range of topics, including pragmatic markers, speech representation, address terms, speech acts, politeness, and registers, genres and style. It is essential reading for both students and scholars of English linguistics and historical linguistics.

For more than two decades now, cognitive science has been making overtures to literature and literary studies. Only recently, however, cognitive linguistics and poetics seem to be moving towards a more serious and reciprocal type of interdisciplinarity. In coupling cognitive linguistics and poetics, cognitive poeticians aim to offer cognitive readings of literary texts and formulate specific hypotheses concerning the relationship between aesthetic meaning effects and patterns in the cognitive construal and processing of literary texts. One of the basic assumptions of the endeavour is that some of the key topics in poetics (such as the construction of text worlds, characterization, narrative perspective, distancing discourse, etc.) may be fruitfully approached by applying cognitive linguistic concepts and insights (such as embodied cognition, metaphor, mental spaces, iconicity, construction grammar, figure/ground alignment, etc.), in an attempt to support, enrich or adjust ‘traditional’ poetic analysis. Conversely, the tradition of poetics may support, frame or call into question insights form cognitive linguistics. In order to capture the goals, gains and gaps of this rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of research, this volume brings together some of the key players and critics of cognitive poetics. The eleven chapters are grouped into four major sections, each dealing with central concerns of the field: (i) the cognitive mechanisms, discursive means and mental products related to narrativity (Semino, Herman, Culpeper); (ii) the different incarnations of the concept of figure in cognitive poetics (Freeman, Steen, Tsur); (iii) the procedures that are meant to express or create discursive attitudes, like humour, irony or distance in general (Antonopoulou and Nikiforidou, Dancygier and Vandelanotte, Giora et al.); and (iv) a critical assessment of the current state of affairs in cognitive poetics, and more specifically the incorporation of insights from cognitive linguistics as only one of the contributing fields in the interdisciplinary conglomerate of cognitive science (Louwerse and Van Peer, Sternberg). The ensuing dialogue between cognitive and literary partners, as well as between advocates and opponents, is promoted through the use of short response articles included after ten chapters of the volume. Geert Brône, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium; Jeroen Vandaele, University of Oslo, Norway.

Sentence (1) represents the phenomenon of reported thought, (2) that of reported speech: (1) Sasha thought: "This is fine" or Sasha thought that this would be fine (2) Sasha said: "This is fine" or Sasha said that this would be fine While sentences as in (1) have often been discussed in the context of those in (2) the former have rarely received specific attention. This has meant that much of the semantic and structural complexity, cross-linguistic variation, as well as the precise relation between (1) and (2) and related phenomena have remained unstudied. Addressing this gap, this volume represents the first collection of studies specifically dedicated to reported thought. It introduces a wide variety of cross-linguistic examples of the phenomenon and brings together authors from linguistic typology, corpus and interactional linguistics, and formal and functional theories of syntax to shed light on how talking about thoughts can become grammar in the languages of the world. The book should be of interest to linguists, philosophers of language, linguistic anthropologists and communication specialists seeking to understand topics at the boundary of stylistics and morphosyntax, as well as the grammar of epistemicity.

This volume provides a new understanding of the role and structure of viewpoint in cognition and communication.

Reference to or quotation from someone's speech, thoughts, or writing is a key component of narrative. These reports further a narrative, make it more interesting, natural, and vivid, ask the reader to engage with it, and reflect historical cultural understandings of modes of discourse presentation. To a large extent, the way we perceive a story depends on the ways it presents discourse, and along with it, speech, writing, and thought. In this book, Beatrix Busse investigates speech, writing, and thought presentation in a corpus of 19th-century narrative fiction including Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Oliver Twist, and many others. At the intersection between corpus linguistics and stylistics, this book develops a new corpus-stylistic approach for systematically analyzing the different narrative strategies of discourse presentation in key pieces of 19th-century narrative fiction. Speech, Writing, and Thought Presentation in 19th-Century Narrative Fiction identifies diachronic patterns as well as unique authorial styles, and places them within their cultural-historical context. It also suggests ways for automatically identifying forms of discourse presentation, and shows that the presentation of characters' minds reflects an ideological as well as an epistemological concern about what cannot be reported, portrayed, or narrated. Through insightful interdisciplinary analysis, Busse demonstrates that discourse presentation fulfills the function of prospection and encapsulation, marks narrative progression, and shapes readers' expectations.

In recent years, research in cognitive linguistics has expanded its interests to cover a variety of texts – spoken, written, or multimodal. Analytical tools such as conceptual metaphor, frame semantics, mental spaces and grammatical constructions have been productively applied in various discourse contexts. In this volume, originally published as a special issue of English Text Construction 3:2 (2010), the contributors, a mix of established and emerging authors in the field, analyse broadcast and print journalism, argumentative scientific discourse, radio lectures on music, and the main literary genres (the poetry of Szymborska and bpNichol, the drama of Shakespeare, the modernist prose of Virginia Woolf and recent fiction by John Banville). Collectively the findings suggest a need to broaden and refine the cognitive linguistic repertoire, while also uncovering new ways to interpret textual data. The book will appeal to researchers and graduate students with interests in cognitive poetics and linguistics, stylistics, pragmatics and construction grammar.