‘I watch your hands like butterflies landing’: Embodied dynamicity in Nick Cave’s similes

IF 0.8 3区文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS

Language and Literature Pub Date : 2025-07-08 DOI:10.1177/09639470251357084

Anne Holm, Esme Richardson-Owen

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

This article presents a corpus stylistic analysis of the embodiedness of Australian-born song writer Nick Cave’s (b. 1957) song lyrics. More specifically, the article explores the use of verbs in Cave’s similes and considers how such constructions, labelled dynamic similes , give rise to a sense of eventfulness anchored in embodiment. Through corpus methods, the prominence of verbs in Cave’s similes is first investigated in contrast to two sub-corpora of the British National Corpus, BNC Fiction & Verse and BNC Newspapers. The comparison shows that Cave’s similes are richer in this regard than the sub-corpora. Further, building on a semantic categorisation of the data, two salient types of simile are analysed more closely: similes containing verbs of movement and psychological processes. Applying insights on profiling verbs from Cognitive Grammar (Langacker, 2008), as well as the notion of eventfulness in lyric texts (Hühn, 2016), the article finds that the dynamicity of Cave’s similes typically serves to convey the intensity of mental processes, even with verbs of movement, and is frequently reinforced through progressive verb forms and accompanying sensory lexis. The article additionally concludes that by evoking experiential similarities (Dancygier, 2022), Cave’s similes often invite embodied engagement on the recipient’s part.

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“我看着你的手，就像蝴蝶落地一样”：尼克·凯夫的比喻中体现的活力

本文对出生于澳大利亚的词曲作家尼克·凯夫（生于1957年）的歌词进行了语料库风格分析。更具体地说，本文探讨了动词在凯夫明喻中的使用，并考虑了这些结构，被称为动态明喻，是如何产生一种固定在具体化中的事件感的。本文首先通过语料库的方法，对比英国国家语料库中的两个子语料库BNC Fiction和amp；诗歌和BNC报纸。对比表明，凯夫的明喻在这方面比子语料更丰富。此外，在数据的语义分类的基础上，更密切地分析了两种显著类型的明喻：包含运动动词和心理过程的明喻。运用认知语法（Langacker, 2008）对动词轮廓分析的见解，以及抒情文本中的事件性概念（h hn, 2016），文章发现，Cave的比喻的动态性通常用于传达心理过程的强度，即使是运动动词，并且经常通过进行动词形式和伴随的感官词汇来加强。这篇文章还得出结论，通过唤起经验上的相似性（Dancygier, 2022），凯夫的比喻通常会引起接受者的具体参与。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Language and Literature Multiple-

CiteScore

1.70

自引率

14.30%

发文量

期刊介绍： Language and Literature is an invaluable international peer-reviewed journal that covers the latest research in stylistics, defined as the study of style in literary and non-literary language. We publish theoretical, empirical and experimental research that aims to make a contribution to our understanding of style and its effects on readers. Topics covered by the journal include (but are not limited to) the following: the stylistic analysis of literary and non-literary texts, cognitive approaches to text comprehension, corpus and computational stylistics, the stylistic investigation of multimodal texts, pedagogical stylistics, the reading process, software development for stylistics, and real-world applications for stylistic analysis. We welcome articles that investigate the relationship between stylistics and other areas of linguistics, such as text linguistics, sociolinguistics and translation studies. We also encourage interdisciplinary submissions that explore the connections between stylistics and such cognate subjects and disciplines as psychology, literary studies, narratology, computer science and neuroscience. Language and Literature is essential reading for academics, teachers and students working in stylistics and related areas of language and literary studies.