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English Department at NIU

Northern Illinois University

Barbara Dancygier
Narrative Anchors and the Processes of Story Construction: the Case of Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin

Elena Semino
Mind Style Twenty-five Years On

David Hoover
Corpus Stylistics, Stylometry, and the Styles of Henry James

Catherine Emmott,  Anthony  J. Sanford, and Eugene J. Dawydiak
Stylistics Meets Cognitive Science: Studying Style in Fiction and Readers’ Attention from an Interdisciplinary Perspective

Mick Short
Thought Presentation Twenty-five Years On 

Barbara Dancygier, “Narrative Anchors and the Processes of Story Construction: the Case of Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin”/ 133
This paper extends the analytic tools developed within blending theory, to propose a new approach to the narrative as a cognitive construct. Specifically, the paper introduces the concept of narrative anchors, defined as textual devices prompting the emergence of narrative spaces. It is argued that a renewed interest in text analysis might provide a link between the local level stylistic choices and the global level construct known as “the story.” Within this framework, stories can be seen as complex blends, emerging from subsequent levels of integration of narrative spaces.
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Elena Semino, “Mind Style Twenty-five Years On” / 153
In this article I show how work on mind style over the last 25 years has built on the account provided by Leech and Short in Style in Fiction. I begin by pointing out the central role of “fictional minds” in current work in narratology. In particular, I endorse the claim, made by many scholars, that fictional minds are primarily (although not exclusively) constructed on the basis of what we know about “real” minds, and can be usefully analysed by means of models developed by cognitive psychologists and cognitive scientists. I then consider the contributions of cognitive theories such as Schema theory and Cognitive Metaphor theory, and of theories from pragmatics such as Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Politeness theory. I finish by considering the use of corpus-linguistic techniques to investigate the systematic linguistic patterns that can be responsible for the projection of mind style.
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David Hoover, “Corpus Stylistics, Stylometry, and the Styles of Henry James” / 174
Stylometry provides powerful techniques for examining authorial style variation. This study uses several such techniques to explore the traditional distinction between James’s early and late styles. They confirm this distinction, identify an intermediate style, and facilitate an analysis of the lexical character of James’s style. Especially revealing are techniques that identify words with extremely variable frequencies across James’s oeuvre–words that clearly characterize the various period styles. Such words disproportionately increase or decrease steadily throughout James’s remarkably unidirectional stylistic development. Stylometric techniques constitute a promising avenue of research that exploits the power of corpus analysis and returns our attention to a manageable subset of an author’s vocabulary. 
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Catherine Emmott,  Anthony  J. Sanford, and Eugene J. Dawydiak, “Stylistics Meets Cognitive Science: Studying Style in Fiction and Readers’ Attention from an Interdisciplinary Perspective” / 204
Readers’ attention has been studied in stylistics using notions such as foregrounding (MukaÍovský) and psychological prominence (Leech and Short). In this article, we offer a fresh perspective on this topic from Cognitive Science. Our research draws on the psychological framework of “depth of processing” (e.g. Sanford and Sturt), which provides a context for studying different degrees of attention during reading. We identify stylistic features and narratological cues in fiction which we intuitively feel to be “attention-capturing devices.” We then use a new psycholinguistic technique, the text-change detection method (Sturt et al.), to test whether the stylistic features we have selected really do make readers more attentive, in the sense of making them more alert to textual detail. 
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Mick Short, “Thought Presentation Twenty-five Years On” / 227
In this article, I briefly describe the Style in Fiction approach to discourse presentation, including thought presentation and how it has developed since 1981 via the Lancaster Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation (SW&TP) project. I then go on to suggest how the various findings we have arrived at have affected our view of thought presentation and how it needs to be described and explained. Finally, I explore some unresolved issues in relation to thought presentation categories at the narrator-dominated end of the thought presentation scale.
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