The late linguist M.A.K. Halliday described the last paragraph of Darwin’s Origin of Species, with its description of a tangled bank, as one of the most remarkable paragraphs in the whole of literature. Yet it appears marred by an obvious grammatical mistake. In this article, we seek to show that the apparent mistake is actually the vestige of a now extinct form of paragraph in which the structure

This article furthers the somewhat underdeveloped area of research regarding the consideration of complex theoretical concepts such as postmodernism and metafiction in relation to children’s literature by concentrating on a stunningly complex—although by no means rare—experimental text aimed at 8–12 year-olds. Using The Secret Series by Pseudonymous Bosch as example, I examine how children’s literature

This article extends the author’s theory of multilevel grounding in meaning generation from its original application to music to the domains of visual cognition and poetry. Based on the notions of ground from the philosophy of language and conceptual blending from cognitive linguistics, the approach views semiosis in works of art as a series of successive mappings couched in a set of six hierarchical

The article discusses the morality of W. B. Yeats’ sonnet Leda and the Swan in the context of a widening gap between the sexual mores of earlier times and our own, and whether the poem remains a suitable choice for the teaching of stylistics. I begin by examining stylistics treatments of the poem, and its political, social and artistic context, then move on to consider charges of misogyny against the

The representation of non-standard and regional accent and dialect in literary fiction has been framed mainly sociolinguistically and treated as an index of authenticity, within an account of characterisation. The reader’s attitude to such speakers in literary fiction is manipulated narratorially and authorially. Since readerly effects, impressions and evaluations are the key issues involved, it seems

This article considers the construction of the profilers and criminals in Thomas Harris’ (2013) [1988] novel Silence of the Lambs through the analysis of selected indicative criminal mind-related extracts. The aim is to consider such characters’ construction through analysis of schematic incongruity, conversational power play, language depicting the actual fictional criminal viewpoint and, lastly,

This paper will develop a cognitive stylistic framework drawn from Conceptual Integration (Blending) Theory (Fauconnier and Turner 2002), and Text World Theory, which uses the idea of elaboration sites as potential structural enablers in mapping across blend spaces. The framework will be used to investigate the operation of allegory and metaphor in Emma Purhouse’s poem ‘Flamingos in Dudley Zoo’. Previous

This article describes how teaching in a second-year undergraduate stylistics workshop was transformed in my attempt to increase student attendance and engagement, and the strategies that were put in place to achieve this outcome. The personal account describes how I changed my teaching pedagogy to facilitate learning through collaborative strategies and how I evaluated the impact this had on student

It is my pleasure to contribute to a volume in honor of Urszula Clark.1 It was her intense involvement in pedagogical stylistics and commitment to education that brought us together and, upon her retirement, I am honored to pay tribute to her dedication and enthusiasm. Throughout her career, Urszula has always encouraged educational initiatives that, as we will see, have by now rendered substantial

This issue of Language and Literature is special. It has been put together to celebrate the scholarly work of a stylistician who has had such a varied and interesting career that some of her expertise cannot even be captured by a stylistics journal. Professor Urszula Clark, who retired in early 2020 from Aston University, United Kingdom, has been a long-standing member of the stylistics community but

This article considers how ideas from relevance-theoretic pragmatics can be applied in understanding the construction of identity in interaction, while presupposing that consideration of ideas about identity can make a significant contribution to pragmatic theories. While previous work on pragmatics has focused on the construction and performance of identity, this has not been much discussed in work

Writing the ‘Year’s work’ article is always a pleasure and a challenge. This year those twin features have been elevated by the conditions imposed by the pandemic; to be sure, many of us have had to adapt all too quickly to conducting our working lives and a good deal of our other lives online. Writing a review article from lockdown is a particular challenge for one who prefers a book with physical

Conspiracy fantasy or – to use the more common but less accurately descriptive term – ‘conspiracy theory’ is an enduring genre of discourse historically associated with authoritarian political movements. This article presents a literature review of research on conspiracy fantasy as well as two empirical studies of YouTube videos by three leading conspiracy fantasists. Two of these fantasists have been

The popularity of literary biographies and the importance publishers place on author publicity materials suggest the concept of an author’s creative intentions is important to readers’ appreciation of literary works. However, the question of how this kind of contextual information informs literary interpretation is contentious. One area of dispute concerns the extent to which readers’ constructions

This article argues for the distinctive nature of cognition involved in correspondence, arguing that this cognition is highly creative and in corollary, arguing that this cognition is positioned within social and cultural conditions that must be considered in a full analysis. The author argues that letters are often written from the perspective of an “embodied epistolary present,” the letter writer’s

The application of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics to analyse literary texts has been a prevalent approach in the field of stylistics. However, previous studies have mainly focused on the three metafunctions, that is the experiential, the interpersonal and the textual metafunctions, on the level of the clause, ignoring the logical metafunction on the level of the clause complex. Therefore

Grammar is one of the levels within the language system at which authorial choices of one mode of expression over others must be examined to characterise in full the style of the author. Such choices must however be assessed in the context of an understanding of the extent of variability that exists generally in the language. This study investigates a set of grammatical features to understand their

Drawing on the Enhanced Shakespearean Corpus: First Folio Plus and using corpus-based methods, this article explores, quantitatively and qualitatively, Shakespeare’s depictions of five deceptive characters (Aaron, Tamora, Iago, Lady Macbeth and Falstaff). Our analysis adopts three strands: firstly, statistical keywords relating to each character are examined to determine what this tells us about their

The Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language project has produced a resource allowing users to explore Shakespeare’s plays in a variety of (semi-automatic) ways, via a web-based corpus query processor interface hosted by Lancaster University. It enables users, for example, to interrogate a corpus of Shakespeare’s plays using queries restricted by dramatic genre

Shakespeare’s clearest use of dialect for sociolinguistic reasons can be found in the play Henry V, where we meet the Welshman Captain Fluellen, the Scotsman Captain Jamy and the Irishman Captain Macmorris. But what might contemporary audiences have made of these Celtic characters? What popular understandings of Celtic identities did Shakespeare’s characters trigger? Recent technological developments

This article considers the linguistic features of the speeches that end Shakespeare’s plays, some of which are formally labelled as Epilogues. It introduces a play’s last words as a type of paratext using the theoretical models devised by Genette (1997), and then considers the material evidence surrounding Epilogues, a specific form of last words, using research on their ephemeral and occasional nature

Teaching and learning Shakespeare takes place across the world. Pedagogical matters have been the subject of much discussion in the last few decades. This article begins by reviewing that discussion, showing how different approaches – textual, contextual and active (or performance) – connect with the language of the plays. No study, it is pointed out, has conducted an empirical investigation as to

This study empirically investigates reader responses to the one-page graphic narrative ‘City’ within the theoretical framework of storyworld possible selves. These are blended structures resulting from the conceptual integration of two input spaces: the mental representation that readers construct for the narrator or character that perspectivizes a narrative, and the mental representation that readers

This article contributes new insights into the interplay between textual and reader factors in experiences of narrative empathy, or empathy with characters in narrative. It adds to the rather scarce empirical evidence on the relationships between textual devices and readers’ (non-)empathetic responses to characters. This empirical study involved stylistic-narratological analysis of short stories by

Louise Nuttall, Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar: Language and Worldview in Speculative Fiction, Bloomsbury: London, 2018; 213 pp.: ISBN 9781350010536, £102 (hbk), Epub 28 February 2020, DOI: 10.1177/0963947020910528.

Woolf’s work has been the object of several studies concerned with her experimental use of techniques of speech, thought and consciousness presentation. These investigated the way in which different perspectives coexist and alternate in her writing, suggesting that the use of such techniques often results in ambiguous perspective shifts. However, there is hardly any empirical evidence as to whether