Abstract This paper examines the penetrative use of the second-person pronoun ‘you’ in thought presentation, with special focus on Samantha Harvey’s Orbital (2023). While the use of ‘you’ has been widely studied in spoken narratives and second-person fiction, this study explores its functions particularly in character thought presentation. Drawing on Sorlin’s (2022) six-point reference model, it demonstrates how ‘you’ in Orbital functions in three key ways: as self-address, as apostrophic address to absent others, and as a collective pronoun encompassing the crew. These uses are inherently ambiguous, shifting between specificity and generality, and they enable the narrative to bridge the astronauts’ physical reality to their emotional ties to Earth. In doing so, ‘you’ reveals both individual and collective subjectivity, inviting readers into a shared perspective that emphasizes interconnection and vulnerability.
Abstract This article aims to take an interesting theoretical issue – namely diversity of interpretation and its thematization in metahermeneutics – as a point of departure for an innovative exercise on interpreting narratives in professional contexts as well as in the classroom. We build on Liesbeth Korthals Altes’s idea that readers attribute an ethos (of, for example, sincerity, reliability, authority, or irony) to characters, narrators, and authors, and try to make it more specific in two ways. First, we argue that ethos attributions depend upon the psychological and emotional predispositions that readers bring to the narrative through prior experiences, but also their specific positionality. Theoretical concepts that are useful in this context are Marco Caracciolo’s notion of the experiential background and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectional categories, both of which differ from reader to reader. Second, we argue that individual narrative techniques in the text must also be considered if we want to understand how readers construct the meaning of a given narrative. In other words, readers do not only attribute an ethos (i.e., values, beliefs, or world views) to characters, narrators, and authors but also to narrative techniques such as paratextual features, intertextual references, the plot development, or aspects of the storyworld. We offer the categories of retrospective relations , prospective relations , and speculative relations as features of the relatability of the experiences rendered through narratives. The individual realizations of experiential relatability are an important factor for explaining the reasons behind different interpretations of texts. The article also contains a qualitative case study, which involves a discussion of different interpretations against the foil of experiential backgrounds and intersectional identity categories, as an example of the kind of metahermeneutic exercise we have in mind.
Prior studies have extensively examined narrative empathy and negative empathy, which primarily concern the readers' affective engagement with fictional characters. This study shifts the focus to discourse from reader response by conceptualising de-empathy as a strategic stance that resists full emotional alignment while maintaining social intelligibility within television literature. Drawing on the excerpts from six works of contemporary Chinese emotional television literature, this study examines how the internal factors drive de-empathy into external linguistic manifestations. Accordingly, three strategies of de-empathy (affective, behavioural, and cognitive) have been identified through the lens of linguistic analysis, which illuminate how emotion (ganqing), relational expectations (renqing), and moral evaluation (deqing) are discursively negotiated. By pinpointing the discursive patterns and the underlying affective and moral norms, the study offers insight into the modulation of emotional distance in television literature narratives. Moreover, the findings above also invite reflection on the applicability of the de-empathy framework to broader literary and media contexts, highlighting its potential for cross-cultural analysis of affect and interpersonal negotiation.
It is commonly assumed that the subject of a sentence is the preferred antecedent for a subsequent pronominal or zero anaphor. However, in some contexts the antecedent is instead the object, which may lead to misinterpretation. This paper aims to identify factors that influence the interpretation of referring expressions other than subjecthood, as well as the conditions under which these factors operate. In Haruki Murakami's 1Q84, the interpretation of referential forms appears to be influenced by projection, that is, the adoption of a character's point of view. Projection is often signalled by linguistic cues such as a verb of perception in the preceding sentence, expressions of uncertainty or intentionality, a verb in the present tense, and the use of the durative aspect in the sentence itself. Even when the character being projected is not the subject of the preceding sentence, or the referent of a pronominal or zero anaphor is not the character onto whom the narrator projects, referent identification seems to be governed primarily by the point of view of a projected character who holds the status of a main character. The English translations indicate that while certain factors make ambiguous forms more likely to refer to the subject of the previous sentence, point of view also plays a role in referent identification in English.
The idea that some novels are more 'difficult' than others is invoked in many non-academic discussions of literature. However, linking readerly experiences of difficulty to specific textual features of prose fiction has proved challenging. This paper seeks to build a stylistic framework for exploring difficulty in prose fiction, building on Castiglione's 'Linguistic Aspects of Difficulty' checklist developed for use with poetry. It applies this revised framework to excerpts from two texts - Virginia Woolf's Orlando and Toni Morrison's Beloved - to demonstrate the utility of the revised list. It then draws on reviews from the Goodreads website to explore how the presence of linguistic markers of difficulty may be linked to reader responses.
This paper provides a transdisciplinary approach linking translation studies with cognitive linguistics and poetics. Following El & zdot;bieta Tabakowska's pioneering research into this problem, we use Ronald Langacker's notion of construal to operationalize and evaluate the equivalence in translation. However, we also couple this notion with the cognitive poetics' concept of defamiliarization as proposed and developed by Peter Stockwell. We claim that defamiliarization arises as a result of the interplay of imagery in a context. As an illustration material we use Miron Bia & lstrok;oszewski's Pami & eogon;tnik z Powstania Warszawskiego and its translation into English (A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising translated by Madeline G. Levine).
This study examines the linguistic representation of childhood trauma in Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's The Discomfort of Evening (2020) through a child narrator's perspective. Unlike research on the impact of national or historical trauma on individuals, this analysis focuses on personal trauma, exploring how personal childhood trauma is constructed in the child narrator's voice. Using cognitive stylistic analysis, mind style theory, and trauma studies, the research investigates connections between linguistic patterns, cognitive processes, and trauma manifestation. This interdisciplinary approach reveals psychological intricacies overlooked by thematic analysis. Close textual analysis demonstrates how linguistic structures such as intense sensory imagery and temporal collapse - known childhood trauma features - represent and illuminate the character's deteriorating mental state. Contributing to child trauma narrative studies in contemporary fiction, this study explores the complex relationship between language, trauma, and psychological development in representing the psychological impact of childhood trauma. The findings also offer insights relevant to narrative-based therapies and cross-cultural comparisons of trauma expression, demonstrating how literary analysis can inform both theoretical understanding and practical applications in clinical contexts.
This paper examines the applicability of Frame Semantics in studies on oral poetries, as proposed by H.C. Boas (Boas, Hans C. 2016. Frames and constructions for the Study of oral poetics. In M. Antovi & cacute; & C. P. C & aacute;novas (eds.), Oral Poetics and Cognitive Science. Vol. 56, Lingae & Litterae, 99-124. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter). It presents a case study on Early Arabic Poetry, and Classical Arabic frames analogous to the English Revenge. The goal of the study was to assess the utility of the FrameNet model in systematically recording oral-formulaic "story patterns" and exploring the interchangeability of lexical units based on prosodic conditions. The findings support Boas' claims, indicating, however, significant limitations of the proposed application of the model: lack of tools for addressing 1) contextual means of evocation and 2) oral-formulaic "story patterns" encoded by figurative language. The paper suggests augmenting the FrameNet model with a new relation encodement proposed by Torrent et al. (Torrent, Tiago Timponi, Ely Edison da Silva Matos, Frederico Belcavello, Marcelo Viridiano, Maucha Andrade Gamonal, Alexandre Diniz da Costa & Mateus Coutinho Marim. 2022. Representing context in FrameNet: A multidimensional, multimodal approach. Frontiers in Psychology 13. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.838441.), and with a record of conceptual blend operations on catalogued frames.
This paper focuses on the representation of sexual violence in the neo-slave narratives of Margaret Walker, Octavia E. Butler and Toni Morrison. Through an exploration of mind-modelling in three key scenes, a range of linguistic techniques are employed to elucidate the psychological component of such violence. Each of the three authors examined here exposes, in stylistically distinct ways, different but equally devasting aspects of the violence visited upon enslaved women. Taken together, a holistic poetics of sexual violence and slavery emerges: the myth of volition and consent is dismantled, and the representation of trauma is brought to the fore.
As an important representative of contemporary Chinese avant-garde, Can Xue’s fiction has a unique language style. The use of onomatopoetic reduplications is one of the major linguistic means of her acoustic narration, which is often closely associated with sound-related metaphoric mappings, shifting of narrative viewpoints and so on in the fiction. By comparing various ways of construal and stylistic choices made by different English translators of Can Xue’s fiction based on the comparative and parallel corpus, it is found out that transliteration of onomatopoetic reduplications is an effective means of reconstructing iconicity in acoustic narrative, which can not only enrich foreignized sensory experiences of readers but also make them accept the language and culture of the “other” in a better way. This also reflects the translator’s creative and personalized cognitive style.
Fantasy literature and music have long been associated in a multitude of contexts, with extensive discussions on the roles and functions that music plays in fantasy worlds. Yet, careful attention has not been paid to the mechanisms employed to incorporate the medium of music into the literary text. We contend that by using corpus techniques and tools we can accurately test certain literary critical claims about the representation of music-in-literature. Specifically, we rely on corpus tools to analyze the keyness and distribution of various music-related terms while drawing on established taxonomies to assess the thematic and structural roles of music in Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind (2007). Our results provide evidence that the novel can be considered as musicalized fiction and help us recognize the particular superstructure imitated by the novel, a bard’s live performance.
