Text World Theory is a powerful framework for discourse analysis that, thus far, has only been used in monolingual Anglophone stylistic analyses. This work adapts Text World Theory for the analysis of Spanish discourse, and in doing so suggests some improvements to the way in which it deals with discourse - in particular, with direct speech and conditional expressions. Furthermore, it applies Text World Theory in a novel way, searching not for style in language, but for the style of a language. Focusing principally on deixis and modality, the author examines whether Spanish speakers and English speakers construct the narrative text-world in any patterned ways. To do so, the 'frog story' methodology is employed, eliciting spoken narratives from native adult speakers of both languages by means of a children's picture book. These narratives are transcribed and subjected to a qualitative text-world analysis, which is supported with a quantitative corpus analysis. The results reveal contrasts in Spanish and English speakers' use of modality and deixis in building the same narrative text-world, and are relevant to scholars working in language typology, cross-cultural pragmatics and translation studies. These novel applications of the Text World Theory push the boundaries of stylistics in new directions, broadening the focus from monolingual texts to languages at large.

This textbook introduces the reader to contemporary approaches to language analysis such as cognitive stylistics and corpus stylistics, reflecting recent shifts in research trends and offering students a practical way to access and understand these developments. The authors lead readers through detailed explanations, guided analyses, examples of research and suggestions for further reading. This textbook makes an ideal introduction to the field of stylistics for students who are new to the area, but who have some background in basic language analysis. It will be of use to students on courses in stylistics, literary linguistics, corpus methods, cognitive linguistics, and language and style.

World Building represents the state-of-the-discipline in worlds-based approaches to discourse, collected together for the first time. Over the last 40 years the 'text-as-world' metaphor has become one of the most prevalent and productive means of describing the experiencing of producing and receiving discourse. This has been the case in a range of disciplines, including stylistics, cognitive poetics, narratology, discourse analysis and literary theory. The metaphor has enabled analysts to formulate a variety of frameworks for describing and examining the textual and conceptual mechanics involved in human communication, articulating these variously through such concepts as 'possible worlds', 'text-worlds' and 'storyworlds'. Each of these key approaches shares an understanding of discourse as a logically grounded, cognitively and pragmatically complex phenomenon. Discourse in this sense is capable of producing highly immersive and emotionally affecting conceptual spaces in the minds of discourse participants. The chapters examine how best to document and analyze this and this is an essential collection for stylisticians, linguists and narrative theorists.

Narrative Retellings presents pioneering work at the intersection of stylistics and narrative study to provide new insights into the diverse forms of fictional and factual narratives and their retellings. Common types of retelling, such as translation, adaptation, textual intervention and reader responses are reconceptualised in the chapters, and fresh insights are offered into experiences retold as autofiction, witness statements and advertorials on social media. From modernising the most cherished novels of Jane Austen to deciphering conflicting testimonials following the Hillsborough disaster, this volume reveals the complexities involved in all forms of narrative retellings. As such, it makes a valuable contribution to the interdisciplinary study of stylistics and to the understanding of narrative texts.

Bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines, this book explores the analysis of crime-related language. Drawing on ideas from stylistics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, metaphor theory, critical discourse analysis, multimodality, corpus linguistics, and intertextuality, it compares and contrasts the linguistic representation of crime across a range of genres, both fictitious (crime novels, and crime in TV, film and music), and in real life (crime reporting, prison discourse, and statements used in courts). It touches on current political topics like #BlackLivesMatter, human (child) trafficking, and the genocide of the Kurds among others, making it essential reading for linguists, criminologists and those with a general interest in crime-related topics alike. Covering a variety of text genres and methodological approaches, and united by the aim of deciphering how crime is portrayed ideologically, this book is the next step in developing research at the intersection of linguistics, criminology, literature and media studies.

This volume offers readers interested in Discourse Analysis and/or Socio-Cognitive models of language a closer view of the relationship between discourse, cognition and society by disclosing how the cognitive mechanisms of discourse processing depend on shared knowledge and situated cognition. An inter- and multidisciplinary approach is proposed that combines theories and methodologies coming from Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Multimodal Metaphor Theory, Critical Discourse Analysis, Narratology, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Appraisal Theory, together with the most recent developments of Socio-Cognitive Linguistics, for the analysis of real communicative events, which range from TV reality shows, commercials, digital stories or political debates, to technical texts, architectural memorials, newspapers and autobiographical narratives. Still, several key notions are recurrent in all contributions -embodiment, multimodality, conceptual integration, metaphor, and creativity- as the fundamental constituents of discourse processing. It is only through this wide-ranging epistemological and empirical approach that the complexity of discourse strategies in real contexts, i.e. human communication, can be fully comprehended, and that discourse analysis and cognitive linguistics can be brought closer together.

Shortlisted for the ESSE 2022 Book Awards Shortlisted for the 2022 SAES / AFEA Research Prize Building on an upsurge of interest in the Americanisation of British novels triggered by the Harry Potter series, this book explores the various ways that British novels, from children's fiction to travelogues and Book Prize winners, have been adapted and rewritten for the US market. Drawing on a vast corpus of over 80 works and integrating the latest research in multimodality and stylistics, Linda Pillière analyses the modifications introduced to make British English texts more culturally acceptable and accessible to the American English reader. From paratextual differences in cover, illustrations, typeface and footnotes to dialectal changes to lexis, tense, syntax and punctuation, Pillière explores the sociocultural and ideological pressures involved in intralingual translation and shows how the stylistic effects of such changes – including loss of meaning, voice, rhythm and word play – often result in a more muted American edition. In doing so, she reveals how homing in on numerous small adjustments can provide fascinating insights into the American publishing process and readership.

Over the last two decades, the study of discourse in film and television has become one of the most promising research avenues in stylistics and pragmatics due to the dazzling variety of source material and the huge pragmatic range within it. Meanwhile, with the advent of streaming and the box set, film and television themselves are becoming separated by an increasingly blurred line. This volume closes a long-standing gap in stylistics research, bringing together a book-level pragmastylistic showcase. It presents current developments from the field from two complementary perspectives, looking stylistically at the discourse in film and the discourse of and around film. This latter phrase comes to mean the approaches which try to account for the pragmatic effects induced by cinematography. This might be the camera work or the lighting, or the mise en scène or montage. The volume takes a multimodal approach, looking at word, movement and gesture, in keeping with modern stylistics. The volume shows how pragmatic themes and methods are adapted and applied to films, including speech acts, (im)politeness, implicature and context. In this way, it provides systematic insights into how meanings are displayed, enhanced, suppressed and negotiated in both film and televisual arts.

This book focuses on how readers can be 'manipulated' during their experience of reading fictional texts and how they are incited to perceive, process and interpret certain textual patterns. Offering fine-grained stylistic analysis of diverse genres, including crime fiction, short stories, poetry and novels, the book deciphers various linguistic, pragmatic and multimodal techniques. These are skilfully used by authors to achieve specific effects through a subtle manipulation of deixis, metalepsis, dialogue, metaphors, endings, inferences or rhetorical, narratorial and typographical control. Exploring contemporary texts such as The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Remains of the Day and We Need to Talk About Kevin, chapters delve into how readers are pragmatically positioned or cognitively (mis)directed as the author guides their attention and influences their judgment. They also show how readers' responses can, conversely, bring about a certain form of manipulation as readers challenge the positions the texts invite them to occupy.

Crime narratives form a large and central part of the modern cultural landscape. This book explores the cognitive stylistic processing of prose and audiovisual fictional crime 'texts'. It also examines instances where such narratives find themselves, through popular demand, 'migrating' - meaning that they cross languages, media formats and/or cultures. In doing so, Crime Fiction Migration proposes a move from a monomodal to a multimodal approach to the study of crime fiction. Examining original crime fiction works alongside their translations, adaptations and remakings proves instrumental in understanding how various semiotic modes interact with one another. The book analyses works such as We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Killing trilogy and the reimaginings of plays such as Shear Madness and films such as Funny Games. Crime fiction is consistently popular and 'on the move' - witness the spate of detective series exported out of Scandinavia, or the ever popular exporting of these shows from the USA. This multimodal and semiotically-aware analysis of global crime narratives expands the discipline and is key reading for students of linguistics, criminology, literature and film.