In gangster movies, mob bosses typically communicate their criminal objectives to henchmen or adversaries in opaque ways. This type of discursive behaviour considerably contributes to the creation of suspense for film audiences, since a startling sense of uncertainty and anticipation is evoked until the intimidatory words eventually culminate in violent actions. This paper adopts a qualitative pragma-stylistic

Autofiction is characterized by ambiguation of generic conventions. While postmodern autofictional texts often explicitly comment on genre, much autofiction avant-la-lettre merges generic modes more subtly, namely through narrative structure and style. The article argues that, therefore, in the exploration of autofiction in a diachronic perspective, consideration of stylistic and narratological details

This article uses a diachronic approach to examine how on social media platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, readers of fiction discuss and also stage strong affects connected with their reading of ‘books that made me cry’. While this trend may seem to be generated wholly by the affordances of digital media, it will be examined in what interesting ways it also connects with the eighteenth-century vogue

The paper presents key results in the diachronic analysis of recognition (Aristotle’s concept of anagnorisis ) in works of Anglophone narrative fiction and film. Its focus is on the developing cognitive diversity in the representation of character responses during the cognitive-emotional crux which occurs at the heart of the recognition scene. The three forms covered are the recognition of close relationships

This study explores a possible change in politeness conventions in Scottish correspondence written between 1570 and 1750. It is hypothesised that longer request sequences, that is, macro-requests, will display a diachronic shift towards a more prominent use of addressee-oriented face-enhancing speech acts as supportive moves, for instance, compliments or thanking, which have been found to be typical

This article discusses Chaucer’s perspective on the ideological structures that inform the writing of literary history. In the first verses of the Franklin’s Tale , Chaucer first engenders and then deconstructs an – implicit – teleological narrative of literary history that links questions of genre, orality and history only to deconstruct, in almost the same breath, that very narrative by poetic means

The development of uses of reader (third-person and vocative) are investigated in the Corpus of Late Modern English Text (1710-1920) with regard to frequencies and functions. Overall, reader declines, indicating a shift away from nominal and more formal style. Third-person uses are more common than vocatives, which cluster especially in the early nineteenth century and in emotive, personalized texts

Middle English is the essential stage in the development of English second-person pronouns. This is the time when honorific forms ye / you / your emerge, as commonly believed under French influence, gradually become default, and eventually oust the inherited singular forms thou / thee / thi(ne) to marked contexts and regionally restricted varieties. This paper addresses the initial stages of these

Both linguists and literary scholars deal with change over time. This special issue approaches the question of diachronic development from a comparative perspective, contrasting the ways in which analysis of changes observable in literary texts over the centuries is handled in the realm of literary studies and how linguists discuss language-specific (dis)continuities from one period to the other. For

This paper reports an initial application of contemporary cognitive stylistics to forensic linguistic contexts. In both areas, a need has been identified for robust analyses. An intercoder reliability study was developed using data from a historic authorship analysis case involving single-authored hate mail. Exploring the applicability of Cognitive Grammar’s notion of construal as a reliable framework

This article examines pronominal references to anthropomorphic animal characters in contemporary Finnish-language picture books for children ( N = 531). In the Finnish language, the choice of third person pronoun is a key means of distinguishing humans from other animals. The study shows that animal characters in children’s literature are linguistically placed between humans and nonhumans: in about

The study of linguistic variation in fiction often concerns the use of dialect features as a tool for characterization; however, its use in situating the author in the construction of the text is less remarked upon. This paper considers both of these uses by examining Lemony Snicket’s usage of four sociolinguistic variables in A Series of Unfortunate Events . ASOUE is of particular interest because

The aim of this paper is to analyse Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: An American Musical in terms of its approaches to storytelling and narration. A selection of songs will be analysed focusing on their narrative traits and the figure of the narrator, including its (un)reliability. It will be argued that the songs in Hamilton can be classified depending on their approaches to storytelling, including

Understanding the interaction between people and the environment is one of the issues facing contemporary society. In recent dramatic works, the reflection on sustainability and ecological preservation as a crucial necessity in contemporary society has taken center stage. A case in point is Laura Wade’s Colder Than Here (2005), in which the protagonist, Myra, who is diagnosed with terminal cancer,

This study examines gender representation in Oscar Wilde’s comedy and satire, Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), using corpus stylistic analysis. Specifically, it analyzes gender characterization patterns in the original drama and explores how these patterns shift in two Chinese translations: Shen Xingren’s translation in 1918 and Hong Shen’s translation in 1923. By analyzing keyword patterns, collocational

With the growing prevalence of health and illness narratives on digital platforms, research examining the social psychological processes involved in these storytelling environments remains scarce. This paper addresses this research gap by conducting a mixed-methods study of digital storytelling within the UK’s healthcare context, focusing on online consumer reviews of the medical memoir, Do no harm:

This essay adopts a Critical Stylistic approach to disclose the linguistic mechanisms of creation of (counter-)ideological meaning in a specific type of gendered text, that is the female-targeted periodical Vogue at the beginning of the twentieth century. In particular, it investigates the linguistic construction of femininity in the fashion content of the twenty-four issues of the magazine published

Poetry is often described as having ‘unusual syntax’. Based on a close study of nine cywydd poems by the fourteenth century Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym, I identify attributive adjectives and preverbal particles as the loci of substantial departures in poetic language from the ordinary grammar of contemporary Welsh, providing an optimality theoretic analysis of the interaction between the linguistic

This paper discusses how the concept of norms of speech and thought presentation relates to speech and thought presentation in actual texts with reference to the examination of two corpora, Semino and Short’s discourse presentation corpus, and a corpus of contemporary present-tense fiction. Through this approach, we review the meanings of the norms in each kind of discourse presentation. Leech and

Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed (1974) is the first literary treatment of anarchic utopianism, presenting the society on the moon Anarres as operating on social principles lacking any sort of State or governmental oversight (known in the novel as Odonianism). Scholarship on Le Guin’s novel has focused primarily on the overt political and philosophical aspects of the text, while the scant linguistic

I present a posthumanist approach to literary interpretation using stylistic analysis. It is posthumanist since i) digital cameras/audio-video resources and editing applications prompt multimodal r...

Studies on Niger Delta (ND) poetry have applied stylistic and discourse analyses in exploring the metaphorical elements of the deplorable ecological condition of the region, but how these elements ...

This paper examines the manifestation of individual style through the lens of a specific language category: the interjection. The analysis considers how interjections are used as a resource in the ...

This article investigates power dynamics reflected in the conversations between characters in Arthur Miller’s written text, A View from the Bridge, from the perspective of pragmatic stylistics. Giv...

As one of the master stylists of our time, John Banville has honed his own unique style of writing. The typical Banville novel is a first-person confessional narrative of an aging male character tr...

Most stylistic analyses of literary texts begin with the text proper, largely ignoring the paratextual elements that precede it. The extent of this lacuna within stylistics is so great that a searc...

This article presents a new model of humour that can be used in the successful analysis of how and why literature can be found humorous. It deconstructs the theory that the perception of incongruit...

Geoff Hall took degrees separately in English literature and in applied linguistics at the universities of Sussex and Birmingham, respectively. A career in English teaching of all kinds has taken h...

Paul Simpson got his PhD from the University of Ulster in 1984 and took up a post at the University of Nottingham the same year. He has since worked at Queen’s University Belfast and Liverpool Univ...

Mick Short is Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at Lancaster University, UK. He studied English at the University of Lancaster from 1965, just one year after the university firs...

Katie Wales was Professor of English Language at Royal Holloway College, University of London, before moving to the University of Leeds to become Professor of Modern English Language. She later mov...

This article represents the first illustration of the tools of disability stylistics on a literary text. It does so by examining the representation of blindness in an extract from Robert Louis Stev...

While stylistics has successfully integrated the study of language use in film and television, relatively little research has tried to systematically classify the functions of television or film di...

The use of the present tense as the primary narrative tense has become a commonly encountered phenomenon in contemporary fiction. The textual effects of the use of the present narrative tense, howe...

‘A Mother’ by Joyce tells of Mrs. Kearney’s effort in enhancing her daughter’s musical reputation during the Irish Revival, revolving around a conflict between Mrs. Kearney and a male-dominated gro...

The representation of fictional minds that work in idiosyncratic ways has received significant attention in the past few decades, particularly regarding characters with some form of developmental d...

In November of last year, the stylistics community was saddened to learn of the death of Professor Dr Peter Verdonk, eminent stylistician, editorial board member of Language and Literature and long-time member of the Poetics and Linguistics Association. Peter was an incisive critic, a first-class linguist and a very kind man. As a token of respect for our dear colleague and friend, Peter’s influential

This article aims to provide a stylistically founded model of pathetic fallacy (PF hereafter). Pathetic fallacy is a Romantic literary technique used in art and literature to convey emotions throug...

This article uses a theoretical framework of possible worlds to explore the ways in which Janice Galloway’s novel about grief and depression, The Trick is to Keep Breathing, may elicit emotional re...

This article analyses the degree to which readers report a perceived sense of closeness to the events depicted in ‘Belgium’, the opening story of Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone. Theoretically, I draw on Ronald Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar, which models language primarily through its notion of construal, an aspect of which claims that -ing forms impose an internal perspective on a scene that results

This article presents a pedagogical stylistics of intertextuality in interactive literary study talk. It analyses case study data representing one higher education seminar discussion, where a tutor and student interpret a focal text through reference to diverse intertexts. The article asks: How do participants enact intertextual literary analysis in conversation? How are intertextual voices introduced

Catchphrases have long been a hallmark of US-American sit-coms and dramas, as well as reality, game and variety show programming. Because the phenomenon of the television catchphrase developed throughout the era of network, commercial broadcasting under Federal Communications Commission guidelines regulating profanity in network television, catchphrases traditionally have not included swear words.

Despite all the attention Puritan sermons have received, no attention has been specifically devoted to the analysis of the two speech acts of blessing and cursing in these sermons from a cognitive-pragmatic point of view. This study aims at doing this, focussing on Winthrop’s A Modell of Christian Charity as a case study. I use the framework provided by the Entrenchment and Conventionalization Model

Present-tense narration has become a prevalent narrative style in English literature over the past few decades. This narrative style tended to be considered unnatural and odd in narrative theory in the late twentieth century (Cohn, 1999; Fludernik, 1996), since using the present tense to describe events at the story level of narrative was regarded as incongruous with the traditional story-telling convention