Paul Simpson

Language, discourse, and literature : an introductory reader in discourse stylistics

This collection shows students of English and applied linguistics ways in which language and literary study can be integrated. By drawing on a wide range of texts by mainly British and American writers, from a variety of different periods, the contributors show how discourse stylistics can provide models for the systematic description of, for example, dialogue in fiction; language of drama and balladic poetry; speech presentation; the interactive properties of metre; the communicative context of author/reader. Among the texts examined are novels, poetry and drama by major twentieth-century writers such as Joyce, Auden, Pinter and Hopkins, as well as examples from Shakespeare, Donne and Milton. Each chapter has a wide range of exercises for practical analysis, an extensive glossary and a comprehensive bibliography with suggestions for further reading. The book will be particularly useful to undergraduate students of English and applied linguistics and advanced students of modern languages or English as a foreign language.

‘Reason’ and ‘tickle’ as pragmatic constructs in the discourse of advertising☆

Abstract This paper explores certain pragmatic features of advertising discourse. It focuses on and expands upon a binary distinction between types of advertising discourse which was proposed initially by Bernstein (1974) and which has been touched upon more recently by other commentators such as Cook (1992). This is the distinction between reason advertisements (those which suggest a motive or reason for purchase) and tickle advertisements (those which appeal to humour, emotion and mood). It will be argued that Bernsteins distinction can be accommodated relatively systematically within contemporary frameworks of language and discourse. Drawing on a range of work in pragmatics and in systemic-functional linguistics, this paper takes some tentative steps towards the development of a theoretical model with accounts for this particular communicative-cognitive dimension of advertising discourse.

Language, culture and identity: With (another) look at accents in pop and rock singing

Taking as its principal point of departure the work of Peter Trudgill, this article offers a linguistic analysis of the accents used in pop and rock music. It examines the singing styles of various performers across a number of decades and across a range of musical genres. It also seeks to develop Trudgills original framework mainly by bringing in additional linguistic research, including some recent work on register analysis, and by drawing on a variety of culturally-situated models from the sociology of pop and rock. Through a largely qualitative analysis, a longitudinal picture is sketched of the way certain styles of singing have shifted over time. Wherever possible, these linguistic changes are charted against the broader cultural, cross-cultural and sociopolitical changes which parallel them and which, arguably, have helped shape them.

7. DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AND STYLISTICS

This review focuses on contemporary work in discourse stylistics, defined here as that designated branch of stylistics which draws specifically on the techniques and methods of discourse analysis. The review acknowledges a key assumption in modern discourse stylistic research, namely that the distinction between ‘literary’ and ‘nonliterary’ discourse, if tenable at all, is drawn not on a purely linguistic basis but in terms of multiple intersections among texts, readers, institutions, and sociocultural contexts. In spanning studies of both literary and nonliterary discourse, therefore, the coverage of the present review is intended to reflect this axiom. It also attempts to foreground the diversity of method and approach in contemporary discourse stylistics. Given that the techniques of discourse analysis are themselves many and various, the survey seeks to cover stylistic work that offers productive applications of the many available models in pragmatics, conversation analysis, cognitive linguistics, speech act theory, and discourse psychology. Finally, in covering a selection of important monographs, articles, and book chapters, the review seeks both to highlight some of the critical, cultural, and ideological frameworks currently employed by discourse stylisticians and to demarcate, in more general terms, the current state-of-play in this research tradition.

Just what is narrative urgency

This article takes as its main point of departure a body of empirical research on reading and text processing, and makes particular reference to the type of experiments conducted in Egidi and Gerrig (2006) and Rapp and Gerrig (2006). Broadly put, these experiments (i) explore the psychology of readers’ preferences for narrative outcomes, (ii) examine the way readers react to characters’ goals and actions, and (iii) investigate how readers tend to identify with characters’ goals the more ‘urgently’ those goals are narrated. The present article signals how stylistics can productively enrich such experimental work. Stylistics, it is argued, is well equipped to deal with subtle and nuanced variations in textual patterns without losing sight of the broader cognitive and discoursal positioning of readers in relation to these patterns. Making particular reference to what might constitute narrative ‘urgency’, the article develops a model which amalgamates different strands of contemporary research in narrative stylistics. This model advances and elaborates three key components: a Stylistic Profile, a Burlesque Block and a Kuleshov Monitor. Developing analyses of, and informal informant tests on, examples of both fiction and film, the article calls for a more rounded and sophisticated understanding of style in empirical research on subjects’ responses to patterns in narrative.

Teaching Stylistics: Analysing Cohesion and Narrative Structure in a Short Story by Ernest Hemingway:

The main aim of this article is to propose an exercise in stylistic analysis which can be employed in the teaching of English language. It details the design and results of a workshop activity on narrative carried out with undergraduates in a university department of English. The methods proposed are intended to enable students to obtain insights into aspects of cohesion and narrative structure; insights, it is suggested, which are not as readily obtainable through more traditional techniques of stylistic analysis. The text chosen for analysis is a short story by Ernest Hemingway comprising only 11 sentences. A jumbled version of this story is presented to students who are asked to assemble a cohesive and well-formed version of the story. Their (re)constructions are then compared with the original Hemingway version. Much interest, it is argued, lies in the ways in which the students justify their own versions in terms of their expectations about well-formedness in narrative. The activity is also intended to encourage students to see literary texts as a valuable means of providing insights into the subtleties of linguistic form and function.

'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’.

Twenty years of Language and Literature: A reflection:

Thus runs Roman Jakobson’s axiomatic statement from the 1958 Indiana Conference on Style. Jakobson’s statement was enshrined in the publicity that accompanied the launch of Language and Literature in 1992 and since the advent of the journal it still remains one of the ‘touchstone’ epigraphs for modern stylistics. Uncontroversially, Jakobson’s aphoristic parallel places stylistics at the interface between linguistic and literary studies, suggesting that it is the literary-linguistic method which best (and alone?) captures the nuanced subtlety of textual composition. Jakobson’s use of metaphor self-reflexively draws from the domain of language and communication and is couched in the frame of linguistic disorders. On the one hand, there is the hearing-impaired linguist, insensitive to the sophistication of poetic composition; on the other, the reticent literary critic, unable to converse with the linguistic method in all its rigour and explanatory potential. With all communicative faculties intact, the stylistician, hearing the ‘poetic function’ while simultaneously able to interact with ‘linguistic methods’, emerges to occupy the central space between the two disciplines. Quite what that central space has now become, and how, if at all, Jakobson’s core tenets have been transformed in current stylistic research, is the subject of the informal observations that follow.

Pedagogical stylistics and literary evaluation

Summary This article is about pedagogical stylistics in general and about the critical evaluation of fictional narrative in particular. It examines levels of narrative organisation in a passage from Ernest Hemingways novella The Old Man and the Sea ([1952]1976) and makes specific reference to patterns of speech and thought presentation in the extract. A basic teaching programme is outlined which is designed to encourage students’ awareness of the way modes of speech and thought presentation function in narrative. The programme is also designed to enable students to place their stylistic analyses of the text against literary‐critical commentaries on the same text, thereby problematising the connections between stylistic analysis and literary evaluation.

Non-Standard Grammar in the Teaching of Language and Style

Thus spoke a bright and well-motivated undergraduate student on my second-year English language module at Queen’s University Belfast during the Spring term of 2005. The module which prompted the remark is one which explores the structure and function of English from a broadly systemic-functional perspective and the student’s faintly disapproving comment came in the wake of a difficult two-hour class on the structure of English clauses.