Mind Style Twenty-Five Years On

Abstract

In this article I show how work on mind style over the last 25 years has built on the account provided by Leech and Short in Style in Fiction. I begin by pointing out the central role of "fictional minds" in current work in narratology. In particular, I endorse the claim, made by many scholars, that fictional minds are primarily (although not exclusively) constructed on the basis of what we know about "real" minds, and can be usefully analysed by means of models developed by cognitive psychologists and cognitive scientists. I then consider the contributions of cognitive theories such as Schema theory and Cognitive Metaphor theory, and of theories from pragmatics such as Grice's Cooperative Principle and Politeness theory. I finish by considering the use of corpus-linguistic techniques to investigate the systematic linguistic patterns that can be responsible for the projection of mind style.

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