In this chapter, we dip our toe into metaphorical language and consider the analysis of metaphor, metonymy and simile in texts. Our discussion of metaphorical language in this chapter integrates linguistic and cognitive approaches. We start by introducing some key notions from Cognitive Linguistics which we then use to lay out a practical guide for the analysis and interpretation of metaphor, metonymy and simile. Our examples of these phenomena are all naturally occurring, drawn from a variety of different texts. We finish the chapter with an overview of how corpus approaches can assist in the exploration of metaphorical language.
Throughout this textbook and others on the subject, the practice of doing Stylistics is often left as inferable from the example analyses. However, this chapter makes the work of Stylistics explicit, by providing a useful guide to completing a project in Stylistics. It brings together the Stylistic tools introduced in the book, discusses how they can be used in an analysis and explains to readers how to carry out Stylistics research. It offers guidance on how to formulate research questions, how to choose a text and relevant tools to analyse it, all of which are important steps in any Stylistics project. It considers data selection (and avoiding ‘cherry picking’) and the role corpus tools can play in providing a quantitative ‘way in’ to longer texts. A large portion of this chapter deals with the process of stylistic analysis, the aim for objectivity and managing subjectivity. The final section of this chapter is devoted to the writing up and layout of a Stylistics paper.
In this chapter, we discuss the notion of style and the analytical approaches used by stylisticians to shed light on how style is created in texts. We chart the origins of Stylistics in Formalism and Structuralism, and the significance of concepts, such as markedness, foregrounding, deviation and parallelism, with reference to examples from poetry. We then examine what we have identified as the three cornerstones of contemporary stylistics—text, cognition and corpora—and introduce some essential concepts elaborated in this book, including the importance of discourse structure.
