Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Text and Discourse: From Poetics to Politics

• Brings together scholars working across stylistics and critical discourse analysis including Peter Stockwell, Joanna Gavins and Elena Semino
• Uses experimental and ethnographic methods for textual research
• Explores phenomena such as metaphor, viewpoint and deixis as well as epiphenomenal qualities such as a text’s ambience, atmosphere, power, ideology or persuasiveness
• Texts analysed include Percy Shelly’s A Summer Evening Churchyard, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, the Lord’s Prayer as found in the Gospel according to Matthew, Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising

Drawing on range of text genres including novels, poems, health forums, holiday guestbooks, prayers, political songs and news stories, each chapter uses cognitive linguistics to shed light on the meanings and meaning-making processes invoked when we encounter texts belonging to different literary and political genres.

The book presents new insights into the workings of textual phenomena such as metaphor, viewpoint and deixis and also sheds light on more elusive, epiphenomenal qualities such as a text’s ambience, atmosphere, power, ideology or persuasiveness. It also takes new strides in cognitive text analysis by exploiting experimental and ethnographic methods to empirically investigate readers’ reception of, and resistance to, texts.