From functional to cognitive grammar in stylistic analysis of Golding’s The Inheritors

Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) is one of the most influential grammars used in stylistics, but more recently the discipline has witnessed a growing body of work using cognitive grammars to explain stylistic effects. This research has tended to make the positive case for cognitive grammar (CG) by demonstrating its similarity to functionalist approaches. However, it is also necessary to say how CG adds to an SFG account of literary effects. To do so, I return to Halliday’s seminal analysis of Golding’s novel, The Inheritors. I use CG to investigate the conceptual processes involved in the reader’s interpretation of the character’s deviant mindstyle and outline some of the ludic and dramatic effects of these reconstrual operations. Thus, whereas SFG focuses on describing the ideational structure of the representations proffered by texts, I argue that a unique affordance of CG is its focus on the readerly construction of meaning

“I can tell the difference between fiction and reality.” Cross-fictionality and Mind-style in Political Rhetoric

In this article, we approach fictionality as a set of semiotic strategies prototypically associated with fictional forms of storytelling (Hatavara and Mildorf, 2017a, 2017b). Whilst these strategies are strongly associated with fiction, they might also be used in non-fictional contexts – or those in which the ontological status of the narrative is ambivalent – to create ‘cross-fictional’ rhetorical effects (Hatavara and Mildorf, 2017b). We focus on one such strategy – the representation of thought and consciousness. Using the concept of ‘mind style’ (Fowler, 1977 and 1996 [1986]; Leech and Short, 1980; Semino, 2007), we investigate the linguistic representation of the British Prime Minister, Theresa May’s, internal monologue in a satirical newspaper article. Throughout the article, the author uses cross-fictionality strategies to represent what May ‘really thinks’ as she delivers a speech to the Conservative Party conference. The stylistic analysis of the Prime Minister’s mind style facilitates an account of the elaborate and nuanced mixing of May and the author’s ideological perspectives throughout the piece. We argue that this cross-fictional, stylistic approach better accounts for the satirical effects of fictionality in the text than those which place a premium on authorial intention and the invented nature of the narrative discourse (for example, Nielsen, Phelan and Walsh, 2015)

Straight talking honest politics: Rhetorical style and ethos in the mediated politics of metamodernity

The leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, is known for his ‘straight talking, honest politics’ (indeed, this was the slogan for his first leadership campaign). This chapter examines the rhetorical construction of authenticity in three videos taken from his official YouTube channel. Some journalists (e.g. Toynbee, 2016) have suggested that the socialist politician’s leadership of the party is symptomatic of the new ‘post-truth’ politics, a political culture in which the rhetorical appeals from ethos and pathos trump those from logos (Browse, 2017: 168). Scholars have pointed to the effect of online media in accelerating this recalibration of what constitutes legitimate argument (Harsin, 2015). This chapter argues that while the term ‘post-truth’ does capture a shift in the kinds of legitimacy claims made by contemporary politicians, it does not adequately explain their causes. Here, they are instead accounted for within the theoretical framework of ‘metamodernism’, which describes the renewed emphasis on “depth” and authenticity in the cultural and political sphere resulting from the economic, political and environmental crises of the 2000s (see van den Akker et al, 2017). Using critical stylistics (Jeffries, 2010) in combination with Chatman’s (1990) notion of the ‘cinematic narrator’, the analyses investigate how the Labour leader and his party’s appeal to authenticity are styled in the videos. Three strategies are identified – Corbyn’s use of populist rhetoric, his allocentric curation of “ordinary” people’s experiences, and the curation of his ethos by others – and these are linked to the renewed sense of historicity, depth and affect that characterise metamodernity. The chapter therefore offers a critical stylistic reading of the socialist politician’s performance of authenticity which is situated with respect to the contemporary metamodern political and media context

Production of very long chain polyunsaturated omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids in plants

We report the production of two very long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids, arachidonic acid (AA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), in substantial quantities in a higher plant. This was achieved using genes encoding enzymes participating in the ω3/6 Δ8-desaturation biosynthetic pathways for the formation of C20 polyunsaturated fatty acids. Arabidopsis thaliana was transformed sequentially with genes encoding a Δ9-specific elongating activity from Isochrysis galbana, a Δ8-desaturase from Euglena gracilis and a Δ5-desaturase from Mortierella alpina. Instrumental in the successful reconstitution of these C20 polyunsaturated fatty acid biosynthetic pathways was the I. galbana C18-Δ9-elongating activity, which may bypass rate-limiting steps present in the conventional Δ6-desaturase/elongase pathways. The accumulation of EPA and AA in transgenic plants is a breakthrough in the search for alternative sustainable sources of fish oils.&nbsp

Reality beckons: metamodernist depthiness beyond panfictionality

It is often argued that postmodernism has been succeeded by a new dominant cultural logic. We conceive of this new logic as metamodernism. Whilst some twenty-first century texts still engage with and utilise postmodernist practices, they put these practices to new use. In this article, we investigate the metamodern usage of the typically postmodernist devices of metatextuality and ontological slippage in two genres: autofiction and true crime documentary. Specifically, we analyse Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being and the Netflix mini-series The Keepers, demonstrating that forms of fictionalisation, metafictionality and ontological blurring between fiction and reality have been repurposed. We argue that, rather than expand the scope of fiction, overriding reality, the metamodernist repurposing of postmodernist textual strategies generates a kind of ‘reality-effect’

(Mega-) metaphor in the text-worlds of economic crisis: towards a situated view of metaphor in discourse

Building on Werth’s (1994) notion of ‘megametaphor’, in this thesis I examine the discourse-level conceptual effects of metaphor in five op-ed articles about the 2008 British financial crisis. I use these analyses to offer three contributions to debates in metaphor studies. Firstly, I attempt to offer a more detailed specification of megametaphor. I argue that whilst megametaphor is a useful concept to start an investigation of discourse-level metaphoric conceptual effects, Werth (1994) does not sufficiently differentiate it from the notion of ‘conceptual metaphor’ (see Lakoff, 1993; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). I define megametaphors as text-driven discourse-level conceptual structures comprised of multiple metaphors. Secondly, I argue that megametaphors are situated within the broader cognitive environments generated in the minds of discourse participants as they take part in a discourse. Analysts therefore have to account for the relationship between megametaphors and the conceptual contexts in which they appear. I argue that Text World Theory (see Gavins, 2007; Werth, 1999) provides the best account of this conceptual context, and suggest that the text-world structures created in the minds of readers scaffolds the integration of individual clause-level metaphors into megametaphors. Finally, drawing on Werth’s (1977, 1994) notion of ‘double-vision’, Steen’s (2008, 2011a, 2011b) notion of ‘deliberate metaphor’ and Stockwell’s (2009) attention-resonance model, I propose a framework for describing the ways in which megametaphors ‘texture’ (Stockwell, 2009) the text-worlds in which they are situated

Revisiting Text World Theory and extended metaphor: Embedding and foregrounding metaphor in the text-worlds of the 2008 financial crash

It has long been recognised that metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon, but also has important cognitive dimensions. To find evidence that metaphor is an important feature of the human conceptual system, cognitive linguists have often searched for clusters of metaphor in discourse that manifest a single conceptual metaphor. As Werth points out, however, in addition to clustering, metaphors can be sustained throughout a discourse. The subtle conceptual effects of these extended metaphors are of particular interest to researchers working in the field of stylistics. In this article, I build on Werth’s account of extended metaphor to explore in more detail these sustained conceptual effects. Like Werth, I draw on Text World Theory to outline a text-world approach to extended metaphor, proposing the idea of a ‘source-world’ to account for how individual, clause-level metaphors combine across a discourse to create a discourse-level conceptual structure. I argue that the source-worlds of extended metaphor are anchored in the text-world structures discourse participants create as they engage with a text and that this embedding of extended metaphor in the discourse gives rise to some of the subtle conceptual effects to which Werth alludes. Building on work by Gavins, Steen, Stockwell and Sullivan, I also argue that source-worlds can be more or less foregrounded or pushed into the background of discourse participants’ mental representations of the text and I propose a linguistic framework to account for the phenomenon of extended metaphor foregrounding. I illustrate extended metaphor embedding and foregrounding by analysing a newspaper opinion piece by Matthew D’Ancona entitled ‘Gordon Brown with siren suit and cigar’