Models of the World in Fiction (Sumary in English)

Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe - HAL - Archive ouverte HAL, 2014

This presentation has a broad focus on unconscious cultural transmission, and demonstrates it by looking at lexical representations in general and at AFFECT in particular in a corpus of one hundred "classic" Anglophone novels written between 1719 and 1997. Research into the lexical inventories of these texts reveals rules of semantic distribution, i.e., rules about what proportion of what kinds of words are found in any given novel. The rules emerge from the study of semantic networks in this corpus; the rules are seen as regularities across time among key semantic patterns. The patterns point to Whorf's observation about the locus of language: "This [linguistic] organization is imposed from outside the narrow circle of the personal consciousness. .. as if the personal mind…were in the grip of a higher, far more intellectual mind which…can systematize and mathematize on a scale and scope that no mathematician of the schools ever remotely approached" (Whorf, 257). As with other linguistic rules we follow without knowing that we are following-e.g., rules of syntax, of phonemes-this presentation suggests that writers follow rules of semantic distribution. These rules are transmitted and utilized unconsciously-to wit, they go through the brain without the mind's consciousness-hence the idea of "cultural neurology." The individual mind of the writer shapes the linguistic material even while keeping the semantic proportions that the brain deems necessary for the genre. The literary novels of this corpus embody and propagate a code, a semantic code, which in turn can inform us as to how the brain functions, not at the level of neurons, but at the level of how and how much information needs to be packaged in a text to be successfully delivered to a reader's brain. Novels are comprised of words, and among the words are family connections, that is, semanticconceptual groups-e.g., words that name parts of the body or actions of the body, or parts of a machine, or feelings, etc. The Historical Thesaurus of the OED (2009) defines the universe of words as falling into three superordinate areas: the external world; the mental world; and the social world. From these emerge twenty-six major semantic frames that in turn open up a half dozen times more. The schema developed in this project (teXtRays: ReadingSquared) is less complexly deep because the word world of the novel is far more constrained than the whole universe of discourse that the OED taps into. The major difference in the organization of words here is that the OED's "external world" is divided at outset into the "raw universe" and the "built world" as a way to more easily see the distinction between two areas of representation important to how writers frame the characters and their interactions in the social realm, and equally important for analyzing the texts for environmental observations or traces of labor, etc. For the purposes of examining the novels, the following large frame was used to separate words: 1) BODY-The Individual Human Body/Being; 2) CONSTRUCTED-The Socially Constructed Domain; 3) BUILT-The Materially Built World; 4) RAW UNIVERSE-The Natural World. These overriding categories open up into a constellation of fifteen subcategories, and these can be opened up into fifty-five sub-subcategories. [see graphic 1] Using the framework of four overarching categories, a dictionary was gradually developed by examining the novels for words that went into each of these semantic groups, which in turn went through several other siftings downward. The first dictionary of the project was derived in the opposite directionfrom individual mentions to categorical rubrics. That first dictionary was for the names (nouns) used for the body and all its parts. Reading novels and searching for body parts, I discerned about one hundred twenty names that were then chunked into five conceptual rubrics (e.g., HEAD, TORSO, etc.), and these categories opened up into nineteen subcategories. Having developed the dictionary-a word-net, a hierarchical conceptual array-it could be used with text mining software to search new texts which could be tabulated and charted-visualized. The four overarching constructs as they are charted out [see graphic 2] show us a very strong pattern of agreement over time: the Raw Universe (bottom band) and the Built World (top band) together occupy about 15% of the references. The largest roles are divided between the Human Body/Being (at about 45%) and the Constructed Social World (at about 40%). The proportions hold steadily in spite of individual differences. Even at this level of zoom, the visual data allows us to make some useful observations and generalizations about the nature of the novel, semantically and from the perspective of cultural neurology-more of which in a few paragraphs.

The study, takes up John Steinbeck's The Pearl as one of the case by applying the sociocognitive model of Van Dijk's theory of critical discourse analysis. CDA is used here as a tool to analyze and study the novel. Besides the use of selected CDA tool in understanding the formation and development of cognitive models from within the text, this paper also relates the findings with the overarching themes of resistance, exploitation, and counter-efforts against the ruling elite or ruling capitalists. The primary objective of this study is to understand and evaluate how context and mental models, as per theoretical disposition by van Dijk, are formed in fiction. The researchers have found that various mental and context models have been formed within the text using different strategies and tools at sentential level. This work concludes the ways in which language is used to varying degrees to exploit, resist and manipulate one another in society. Such sociolinguistic tools can also be applied in other narratives for better and detailed understanding.

Selected Papers from the 22nd International Literature and Psychology Conference, June 29th-July 4th, 2005, 2005

As a result of the growing interest in fiction by recent sociolinguistic research, in this Special Issue, eight sociolinguistic studies on different aspects of fiction have been collected, arguing for the emergence of a new field of study, which I call “sociolinguistics of fiction”. Fiction (e.g. film, TV series, advertising, literature, music) is treated as a broad range of discursive resources and spaces, which is undoubtedly differentiated in the semiotic modes used (e.g. visuals, music), but which is also unified by the fact that it involves the portrayal of events and people in an imaginary setting. Besides, being identified as a “sociolinguistic” research field, sociolinguistics of fiction is distinguished from the broader field of “pragmatics of fiction” (see the recent volume edited by Locher & Jucker 2017), by focusing on “character indexing” (Culpeper & Fernandez-Quintanilla 2017) through sociolinguistic diversity (e.g. geographical dialects, sociolects, minority languages)

Emotional Lexis and the Peculiarities of its Functioning in Fiction Texts // Высшее гуманитарное образование XXI века: проблемы и перспективы: материалы шестой международной научно-практической конференции. – Самара: ПГСГА, 2011., 2011

The article deals with the problem of the emotional lexis and the range of lexical units that is comprehended by the very concept of «emotional lexis». The degree of actualizing the potentional enotional meaning in a fiction text is also analized.

2011

Recent investigations into emotion and discourse processing using the Text World Theory framework (Werth, 1999) regard psychological projection as a key factor in readers’ emotional responses to discourse (Gavins, 2007; Lahey, 2005; Stockwell, 2009). The present article examines psychological projection in relation to an extract from Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) and the comments made by a group of readers discussing the novel. As a result, a more nuanced account of psychological projection is proposed, which highlights the multiple perspectives which readers are able to monitor and adopt during text-world construction. Whilst previous work in Text World Theory has focused upon psychological projection in relation to a single text-world role (such as the addressee, for example), here it is argued that multiple projections in relation to a range of text-world enactors are of fundamental significance in our emotional responses to narrative. Such multiple projections, it is proposed, should receive greater consideration in accounts of our emotional experience of literary discourse.

We have destroyed something by our presence,' said Bernard, 'a world perhaps'.

Language, 1998

Cauriensia. Revista anual de Ciencias Eclesiásticas

Literary works have structures that articulate the possible worlds represented in them using ethical, aesthetic, and religious keys -mimeses of these structures in the real effective world- so that the greater or lesser presence of these keys determines whether the work is coherent, plausible, and meaningful for the reader. Literary theories have omitted the study of this section of reality present in the structure of the works and, therefore, in this article we intend to systematise and describe, using the semantic theory of possible worlds, the functioning of these structures in the processes of representation, creation, and reception of a work of fiction. We also provide a proposal for a model of analysis that ratifies the presence of these articulating structures of the fictional world and regulators of the interactions of the possible characters among themselves, with the world they inhabit and with transcendence. With this research we want to confirm the need to include ethica...

2020

Literature conveys human ideas, thoughts, emotions, feelings and experiences artistically. The use of distinctive grammatical, semantic, and stylistic conventions make the language of literature a field-based register. Based on these presumptions, this article aims to elucidate the deviant features that are prevalent in the literary texts. To obtain the objective, I have employed qualitative content analysis that calls for interpreting the extracts from the authentic literary discourses. The main findings are related to the five-fold features such as grammatical, semantic/lexical, graphological, prosodic, and ornamental, which create markedness of the literary register. These findings reveal that the litterateurs use figures of speech to beautify the presentation of feelings and ideas. This implies that the readers, the writers, and the material producers (like curriculum designers and textbook writers) should be aware of the marked features of the literary texts.