Part of the English Language and Linguistics Research Seminar Series
About this talk
Marcello Giovanelli, Aston University, will be presenting a paper on ' Observation in the poems of Siegfried Sassoon: a cognitive grammar approach'.
Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 2008) has emerged in recent years to become an established analytical method in cognitive stylistics. One of its key affordances is that it provides a framework for analysing the meaningfulness of different types of grammatical representations yet a recent evaluation of work using the model (West 2017) has argued that researchers have tended to ignore the important matter of authorial creativity in their analyses of texts.
This paper aims to redress the balance by using Cognitive Grammar to examine the relationship between ‘construal phenomena’ (Langacker 2008: 55), the unique situations that give rise to writing, and the interpretations of readers engaging with texts. The paper builds both on the work of Kövecses (2015), who has argued that one particular construal phenomenon, metaphor, can be understood as emerging from specific situational contexts, and on the increasingly common practice in contemporary stylistics of explaining textual phenomena through reference to the responses of real readers.
In this paper, I examine a number of poems written by the English First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon. I demonstrate how responses provided by readers (both literary-critical and in a small corpus obtained from the online review site Goodreads) that argue that Sassoon is foremost a visual poet of intense observation can be explained, using Cognitive Grammar, through close attention to the ways in which Sassoon construes events and the characters. I also argue that these construals may be contextualized and understood as motivated by the particular physical, social and cultural environments in which Sassoon was writing.
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