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1. Style in Fiction Revisited
In the early 1980s, which saw the publication of SIF (our abbreviation for Style in Fiction: An Introduction to English Fictional Prose), the study of fictional prose style using the methods of linguistics was an immature field of research. In those days, with notable exceptions such as Fowler's Linguistics and the Novel (1977), most research on stylistics focused on poetry.
Now, twenty-five years later, the situation has changed, and the linguistic analysis of prose fiction has reached considerable maturity (see Emmott; Fludernik, Fictions; Hardy; Hoover; Hori; Simpson; Stockwell, Science Fiction; Toolan, Stylistics; Narrative; and Verdonk and Weber). Partly this has been due to a shift in the centre of gravity of linguistic research, away from a core of syntax, phonology, lexicology, and semantics and towards wide-ranging interdisciplinary studies of text and discourse. Neighbouring and overlapping sub-disciplines such as cognitive science, pragmatics, and discourse analysis (including critical discourse analysis) have featured in this expansion of interest. For example, Carter and Simpson argued for a discourse-analysis-oriented approach and Sell for a pragmatics-oriented approach to the language of literature. On the other hand, the ability to explore whole works of literature from a linguistic viewpoint, rather than to confine attention to short gobbets and passages, has been enhanced through the methods of corpus linguistics, harnessing the power of the computer.
These broader perspectives on style were already opening up when the first edition of SIF was written (1981), as can be noted from its chapters with such titles as "Mind Style," "The Rhetoric of Text," and "Discourse and Discourse Situation." At that stage, however, the applications of such themes to literary style were somewhat tentative and unsophisticated relative to what is happening today. And one research domain was totally lacking in SIF: that of narratology, which the authors felt could be omitted because of its relative independence from the choice of language. Since then, narratology has not only developed into a major research field, but has increasingly concerned itself with the cognitive themes on which much recent work on fictional style has centred. The "logic of the story" (Herman, Story Logic; Narrative Theory) is no longer something "out there" in the fictional world, but is "in here," in the minds of the reader, the narrator, and the characters (Fludernik, "Natural" Narratology).
This growing emphasis on cognitive linguistics (the "cognitive turn" as it has been called) has been accompanied by more sophisticated theorizing about the conceptual models needed to explain the construction of meaning in literary works. One of the most promising cognitive theories is that of mental spaces and conceptual blending (Fauconnier, Fauconnier and Turner, Coulson and Oakley) which has been applied increasingly to literary texts, witness Dancygier ("Blending and Narrative Viewpoint") and other articles in the number of Language and Literature she edited. In her article in the present number of Style, Dancygier takes this theory further, using "narrative anchors" to show how blending of mental spaces can explain a reader's construction of coherence for Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin, a novel broken into apparently disjoint episodes, narrators, and texts.
Related kinds of mental modelling which represent the "cognitive turn" include theories of mental processing and how the mind represents reality. In her article on "Mind Style 25 Years On," Semino shows how improved models involving such constructs as conceptual schemata, mental space blending, and cognitive metaphor have advanced our understanding of how the mind represents the fictional worlds of literary texts.
This emphasis on the mind does not mean, of course, that stylistics has no need to relate the cognitive world to the formal features of texts. To some extent, the remarkable growth of corpus linguistics (see McEnery and Wilson, Kennedy) alongside cognitive linguistics has been a healthy influence, helping to achieve a balance between what is observed on the page of text and what is represented in the mind. As a corpus (in the electronic sense), the works of a great novelist reduce to nothing but a vast array of letters, spaces, and punctuation marks. Yet computational research provides tools for searching, analysing, and classifying this mass of data in ways that could barely be contemplated in 1980. Hoover's article suggests how corpus linguistic techniques can be employed to reveal the answers to large questions such as elements of continuity and change in the oeuvre of a single writer, Henry James, in this case. However much cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics seem to be at the opposite ends of a scale of abstraction, they are in fact increasingly seen as collaborators (Gries and Stefanowitsch). The power of the computer in finding patterns of recurrence and variation can support (or challenge) the models we build to explain the cognitive workings of language in literature: for example, the patterns that can be said to form a mind style. "Corpus stylistics" and "cognitive stylistics," two terms that have come into use since 1981, are not so compartmentalized as might be supposed.
There is another way in which advances in empirical methods can go hand-in-hand with advances in cognitive linguistics and cognitive science. The article by Emmott, Sandford, and Dawydiak, takes up the stylistic concept of foregrounding (in SIF related to psychological and linguistic salience) and shows how prominent features of text can be experimentally correlated with increases in the reader's attention. Intriguingly, however, the text-altering technique of attention-tracking employed does not appear to register signals salient from a narratological, as opposed to a linguistic standpoint: perhaps an indication of the psychological difference between the manner of speaking and the matter spoken of. Can it be, after all, that the age-old dualist model of style (see SIF chapter 1) has some validity?
The article by Short illustrates a further meeting-ground between the empirical world of corpus stylistics and the cognitive world of meaning construction and interpretation. By compiling and annotating a corpus of both literary and nonliterary texts, Short and Semino and their team (see Semino and Short) exhaustively test out the twin scales of speech and thought presentation put forward in the last chapter of SIF and show how these need correction and refinement by the addition of extra types of...
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