Textual properties and attentional windowing: A cognitive grammatical account of Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers

Abstract

Abstract Deploying a cognitive grammar perspective, this paper reads Gustav Hasford’s war narrative, The Short-Timers, as displaying the way attentional windowing is reflected in the language. We have taken the methodological decision of becoming cognitively sensitized to the linguistic texture of traumatically loaded episodes, with the aim of looking at the specific linguistic choices that the producer of literary language has made, and the role played by such linguistic choices in cueing the reader’s attention toward these event frames. Specifically, we demonstrate that confluence of windowing and nesting of attention with theories of conceptual metaphor, schema, and force dynamics can yield a fuller cognitive grammatical account of the foregrounded event frames. It is observed that allocation of salience to such event frames is greatly dependent on phraseology that has a high density of metaphoric constructions.