Introduction

Giovanelli, Marcello

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-88469-7_1

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 23 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…For example, in Giovanelli (2014), I draw on Cognitive Grammar to examine the distribution of verb forms and reference point relationships across Sassoon’s early trench poem ‘A Working Party’ (Sassoon 1917), arguing that the foregrounding of patterns lend itself to specific constraints in mental scanning and subsequently positions the reader to experience the description of the events of the battlefield in a particular way. Taking an empirical approach, in Giovanelli (2022), I examine a corpus of 92 reader reviews of a later collection Counter-Attack and Other Poems (Sassoon, 1918). The reviews highlight that readers report both feeling close to the action of the poems and responding emotionally to them.…”

Section: Reader Responsementioning

confidence: 99%

Cognitive Grammar and Readers’ Perceived Sense of Closeness: A Study of Responses to Mary Borden’s ‘Belgium’

Giovanelli

2022

Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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 in the interpretative effect of it being ‘close by’. This study tests this idea empirically by utilising a quantitative tool (Likert scale) to elicit two sets of verbal data, which are then analysed qualitatively. My analysis demonstrates that readers respond to the events in the story and articulate the relationship of particular language features to their responses in different – and often surprising – ways. The study is the first in stylistics to empirically test the interpretative effects of verb forms as theorised by Cognitive Grammar and thus contributes new knowledge both by exploring how the landscapes of First World War literature are experienced by readers and analysing how the language of those landscapes may give rise to particular reported effects.

show abstract

Section: Reader Responsementioning

confidence: 99%