Joanna Gavins

(Re)thinking modality: A text-world perspective

Abstract The late Paul Werth’s model of human discourse processing, Text World Theory (Werth 1994, 1995a, 1995b, and 1999), has been subject to some dramatic evolutionary changes over the last decade. Here I examine in particular the text-worlds created by the presence of modalized propositions in literary fiction and suggest a number of modifications to Werth’s (1999) handling of this area of discourse. I question Werth’s explanation of modality and use Simpson’s (1993) modal grammar of narrative fiction to formulate a refined text-world account of the conceptual structure of modalized propositions. As a consequence of this investigation, however, I also suggest that a text-world perspective on modality may have much to offer both to Simpson’s modal grammar and to our understanding of modality as a whole.

About the heart, where it hurt exactly, and how often:

Stylisticians were among the first to draw on the insights emerging from cognitive science in order to explore literary works. Recent years have witnessed a wider diffusion of the cognitive turn across literary scholarship, with developments into literary cultural studies and historiography. Unfortunately, this has sometimes been accompanied by a relative neglect of textuality and texture. In this article, we argue again for the necessary centrality of stylistics in literary scholarship, and the continuing requirement to make textuality an integral part of cognitive poetic exploration. We demonstrate the value of Text World Theory (Gavins, 2007a, Werth, 1999) in requiring this integration as an inherent feature of the approach, in the process of exploring reading responses to an emotionally involving poem by Simon Armitage.

Text World Theory

Text World Theory is a cognitive model of human discourse processing. It is a highly interdisciplinary approach and is influenced by a range of different fields, including cognitive psychology, possible worlds logic, cognitive linguistics, and stylistics. Its basic premise is that human beings process and understand discourse by constructing mental representations, or ‘text worlds’, of it in their minds. The text world approach to discourse study was originally formulated by Paul Werth in the 1990s, primarily in relation to literary discourse. More recently, however, Text World Theory has been used as a means of analyzing a broad range of discourse types, from street directions to newspaper language. This article explains the basic mechanics of Text World Theory and provides an introduction to the three main levels of the framework: discourse worlds, text worlds, and sub-worlds.

Leda and the stylisticians

This article presents an analysis of WB Yeats’ ‘Leda and the Swan’ for the 21st century, adopting a Text World Theory perspective (Gavins, 2007; Hidalgo Downing, 2000; Werth, 1999) on this iconic poem. In so doing, I also trace the evolution of the discipline of stylistics – from its roots in formalist linguistics, through functionalist and contextualised stylistics, to the development of cognitive poetics – by examining a series of shifting analyses of the text. I argue that the varying treatments of Yeats’ poem to be found in Halliday (1966), Widdowson (1975) and Burke (2000) can be seen to mirror the development of stylistics over the last half century. I also argue for the positive contribution cognitive poetics can make towards a fuller contemporary understanding of the complex discoursal configuration of ‘Leda and the Swan’, examining both its textual and conceptual structures and its significant political and historical context.

The year's work in stylistics 2004

Cynics amongst the Language and Literature readership, in the UK at any rate, will perhaps be unsurprised that 2004 saw something of an explosion in publications in stylistics. The clock is now audibly ticking for the British Research Assessment Exercise 2008, and the closer the deadline for submissions looms, the more industrious many academics in the field necessarily become. However, even those most pessimistic about the possible negative effects of the ever-increasing pressure to publish on long-term innovation and experimentation in the field may have been comforted somewhat by 2004’s prolific offerings. In stylistics, at least, it would appear that the correlation between quantity and quality remains incontrovertible, with originality and proficiency paralleling the abundance of contributions to the field. Perhaps most encouraging of all have been the pioneering offerings made by those stylisticians with the least to prove – a number of which, interestingly, can themselves be collected around the theme of creativity. Two such texts form the focus of a special review section of this volume of Language and Literature. Rob Pope’s review article ‘The Return of Creativity: Common, Singular, and Otherwise’ is a combined consideration of both Derek Attridge’s (2004) The Singularity of Literature and Ron Carter’s (2004) Language and Creativity. It arises partly out of the recent Creativity symposium, held at the University of Nottingham in May 2005 as part of the Poetics and Linguistics Association’s 25th anniversary celebrations. Pope’s own Creativity: Theory, History, Practice (Pope, 2005) is also newly released and has already claimed its place in next year’s ‘Year’s Work’. The Nottingham symposium brought together these three PALA veterans in an attempt to explore how, why, and to what extent their individual thoughts happened to converge on the notion of creativity in its literary and non-literary contexts. Both Carter and Attridge have provided responses to Pope’s evaluation of their texts as part of this volume’s special review section, as well as commenting on some of the more generally applicable issues surrounding creativity and language use that surfaced during the symposium discussion. For both parties, their recent publications can be recognized as the culmination, to some extent, of long-term concerns. Any reader of Language and Literature will certainly be no stranger to Attridge’s long-standing focus on literary form, or Carter’s ongoing involvement with the CANCODE project. However, those expecting a reiteration of familiar observations and opinions from these two authors will be pleasantly disappointed. Where Attridge’s preoccupation with the peculiarities of literary REVIEW ARTICLE

'Regina v John Terry': The Discursive Construction of an Alleged Racist Event

This article explores the conformation in discourse of a verbal exchange and its subsequent mediatised and legal ramifications. The event concerns an allegedly racist insult directed by high-profile English professional footballer John Terry towards another player, Anton Ferdinand, during a televised match in October 2011. The substance of Terry’s utterance, which included the noun phrase ‘fucking black cunt’, was found by a Chief Magistrate not to be a racist insult, although the fact that these actual words were framed within the utterance was not in dispute. The upshot of this ruling was that Terry was acquitted of a racially aggravated public order offence. A subsequent investigation by the regulatory commission of the English Football Association (FA) ruled, almost a year after the event, that Terry was guilty of racially abusing Ferdinand. Terry was banned for four matches and fined £220,000. It is our contention that this event, played out in legal rulings, social media and print and broadcast media, constitutes a complex web of linguistic structures and strategies in discourse, and as such lends itself well to analysis with a broad range of tools from pragmatics, discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics. Among other things, such an analysis can help explain the seemingly anomalous – even contradictory – position adopted in the legal ruling with regard to the speech act status of ‘fucking black cunt’; namely, that the racist content of the utterance was not contested but that the speaker was found not to have issued a racist insult. Over its course, the article addresses this broader issue by making reference to the systemic-functional interpersonal function of language, particularly to the concepts of modality, polarity and modalisation. It also draws on models of verbal irony from linguistic pragmatics, notably from the theory of irony as echoic mention. Furthermore, the article makes use of the cognitive-linguistic framework Text World Theory to examine the discourse positions occupied by key actors and adapts, from cognitive poetics, the theory of mind-modelling to explore the conceptual means through which these actors discursively negotiate the event. It is argued that the pragmatic and cognitive strategies that frame the entire incident go a long way towards mitigating the impact of so ostensibly stark an act of racial abuse. Moreover, it is suggested here that the reconciliation of Terry’s action was a result of the confluence of strategies of discourse with relations of power as embodied by the media, the law and perceptions of nationhood embraced by contemporary football culture. It is further proposed that the outcome of this episode, where the FA was put in the spotlight, and where both the conflict and its key antagonists were ‘intranational’, was strongly impelled by the institution of English football and its governing body both to reproduce and maintain social, cultural and ethnic cohesion and to avoid any sense that the event featured a discernible ‘out-group’.

The year’s work in stylistics 2003

The field of stylistics continues to charm with its eclectic variety of wild flowers – or frustrate by its lack of co-ordination and clear boundaries, depending on your mood or perspective. On the other hand, cognitivists influenced by more empirical paradigms from psychology are prompting us all to more disciplined methodological principles as they progress and build on each other’s work. This review accordingly follows five headings of Narrative and Discourse; Metaphor and Proverb; Poetry, Play and Translation; Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA); and Variation, to delineate more sociolinguistically oriented and inspired work on variety in use. We conclude with some larger reflections on questions of style and where future research may need to expand its horizons. At the same time it is fully acknowledged that these headings and boundaries are imprecise, overlap and cannot neatly contain all the variety found even in the one year of flourishing publication of 2003. We return to this point also in our Conclusion.

The year’s work in stylistics 2008

This is my fifth and final review of the year’s work in stylistics. From summer 2009, I will be stepping down as Reviews Editor of Language and Literature and taking up my new position as Assistant Editor of the journal. It seems appropriate, therefore, that this year’s survey of publications in stylistics be placed within a broader context; ‘The Year’s Work in Stylistics 2008’ will be informed by a wider consideration of the years’ work since 2003. Over the coming pages, I will, as usual, identify and discuss some of the key research to have been produced in (and on the outskirts of) stylistics in a 12-month period. I will also attempt to position this research within a number of significant wider trends in the discipline, which I have witnessed in development over my six years as Reviews Editor.

The year’s work in stylistics 2005

Last year’s Year’s Work sketched out a bumper year for publications in stylistics, and it is tempting to characterize 2005 as a pause for breath among the stylisticians of the world. However, this would be somewhat misleading. It is true that there were fewer examples of traditional stylistic analysis published this year compared with last year, but the trend towards adaptability, multidisciplinarity and a broadening range of subject matter for exploration has resulted in an even greater diversity than usual. Taking this more inclusive view of stylistics, it has become plain this year that stylistic principles are heading out towards a large number of different locations, and that stylistic practices are becoming influential in work which has until now been regarded as drawing on different traditions. On the one hand, this means that stylistics is becoming more prominent in the wider academic community, which is a gratifying testament to the high quality of recent work. Having said that, there remain large swathes of the world where ignorance of stylistic practices persists, in my opinion to the detriment of scholarly research in those places. On the other hand, the success of stylistics in infiltrating other fields is accompanied by a shift in the variety of stylistics which come into contact with other research paradigms: perhaps we are seeing the beginnings of dialectal diversity as the language of stylistics spreads itself into new and disparate settings. Such new perspectives have great potential to enrich the discipline of stylistics. A useful exercise to illustrate defamiliarization, which will be recognizable to Australian readers, is to present a map of the world with the south pole at the top of the page. As any cognitive linguist will explain, inverting our sense of up and down also has the consequence of effecting disruptions in our projected metaphorical senses of dominance and global power, who is ‘on top’ and who is ‘down under’. A shifted viewpoint shows Europe and North America no longer at the centre of things and the ‘Earth’ is seen to be dominated more by water than by land. National maps always claim prominence in a similar presentational way: Chinese maps do not have Europe at their centre; British maps always note the centrality of the Greenwich meridian. A map of stylistics in 2005 can similarly be presented from a variety of perspectives. The fields of philosophy, psychology, rhetoric and creative writing, for example, have tended to be regarded as unified disciplines, whereas stylistics (or ‘literary linguistics’) has celebrated its own hybridity as an interdiscipline. However, it is easy to shift your own point of view to see stylistics as the core discipline rather than a REVIEW ARTICLE

Gender and Discourse by Ruth Wodak (ed.), 1997. London: Sage, pp. ix + 303, ISBN 0 7619 5098 2 (hbk), 0 7619 5099 0 (pbk)

However, my first glance through Ruth Wodak’s collection Gender and Discourse left me a little surprised to find that a book with such grand marketing ambitions should offer so little guidance for undergraduate-level students. Although Wodak’s introduction provides a brief explanation of some of the main issues and definitions in gender and discourse studies, other helpful tools such as suggested further reading lists, chapter summaries and a glossary are all lacking in this text. Considering its format, Gender and Discourse is perhaps a slightly daunting read for those new to the field. This is not necessarily a fault