Language and Literature最新文献

{"title":"Suspenseful indirectness in gangster film dialogue: A pragma-stylistic study of Scorsese’s mob bosses","authors":"Christoph Schubert","doi":"10.1177/09639470251341387","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470251341387","url":null,"abstract":"In gangster movies, mob bosses typically communicate their criminal objectives to henchmen or adversaries in opaque ways. This type of discursive behaviour considerably contributes to the creation of suspense for film audiences, since a startling sense of uncertainty and anticipation is evoked until the intimidatory words eventually culminate in violent actions. This paper adopts a qualitative pragma-stylistic approach based on speech act theory and research on indirectness, aiming to identify stylistic devices in threatening utterances that trigger suspenseful entertainment. The dataset under discussion comprises the three acclaimed feature films <jats:italic>Casino</jats:italic> (1995), <jats:italic>The Departed</jats:italic> (2006), and <jats:italic>The Irishman</jats:italic> (2019) by influential US-American director Martin Scorsese. As will be shown, suspenseful indirectness is created by a number of lexicosemantic cues, including euphemisms, metaphors, general nouns, and epistemic modals. In addition, indirect utterances rely on grammatical techniques such as unresolved pronouns and rhetorical questions. Finally, suspense is triggered by metacommunicative speech acts that support effective mobster communication by referring to the hearers’ comprehension or the speakers’ intention behind their menacing utterances.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143920427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Disinherited protagonists in the early history of T/V variation in Middle English","authors":"Olga Timofeeva","doi":"10.1177/09639470251327500","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470251327500","url":null,"abstract":"Middle English is the essential stage in the development of English second-person pronouns. This is the time when honorific forms <jats:italic>ye</jats:italic> / <jats:italic>you</jats:italic> / <jats:italic>your</jats:italic> emerge, as commonly believed under French influence, gradually become default, and eventually oust the inherited singular forms <jats:italic>thou</jats:italic> / <jats:italic>thee</jats:italic> / <jats:italic>thi(ne)</jats:italic> to marked contexts and regionally restricted varieties. This paper addresses the initial stages of these developments dealing with the earliest attestations of honorific <jats:italic>ye</jats:italic> in two Middle English romances that make up the so-called ‘Matter of England’. More specifically, its focus is on <jats:italic>Havelok the Dane</jats:italic> (c.1300) and <jats:italic>The Tale of Gamelyn</jats:italic> (c.1350), which both have disinheritance as the central conflict and thus narrate stories of protagonists who are socially ambiguous. This essay investigates how this ambiguity is reflected at the level of second-person pronouns when they address, and are addressed by, other characters. Special attention is given to the notion of ‘interactional status’ theorised by Jucker (2006, 2020) and, in particular, to how it can enlighten several cases of switches between <jats:italic>thou</jats:italic> and <jats:italic>ye</jats:italic> pronouns in the chosen romances.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143915993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Developments in autofictional genre signals: Nouns, pronouns and authorial attachment","authors":"Alexandra Effe","doi":"10.1177/09639470251327502","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470251327502","url":null,"abstract":"Autofiction is characterized by ambiguation of generic conventions. While postmodern autofictional texts often explicitly comment on genre, much autofiction <jats:italic>avant-la-lettre</jats:italic> merges generic modes more subtly, namely through narrative structure and style. The article argues that, therefore, in the exploration of autofiction in a diachronic perspective, consideration of stylistic and narratological details is particularly important, and it outlines developments in autofiction al literature by discussing how three autofictional precursors from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century create generic ambiguity. Henry Fielding, writing before categories of autobiography and novel were properly established, prefaces his <jats:italic>Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon</jats:italic> (1755) with comments on the kind of truth it offers by way of rendering autobiographical experiences in artistically crafted form. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, writing within the nineteenth century’s much more firmly established genre frames, does not comment on these, but, through pronoun ambiguation and structural elements, imbues the first-person account of the eponymous character of <jats:italic>Aurora Leigh</jats:italic> (1856) with autobiographical layers of meaning. As part of more explicit challenges to genre conventions from around the turn of the century, Edmund Gosse’s <jats:italic>Father and Son</jats:italic> (1907) comments on generic hybridity and experiments with first-person attachment, third-person distancing, and stylistic abstraction. From tracing continuities and differences in how these texts create ambiguity about autobiographical and fictional modes and meanings, this article draws conclusions about attempts to define autofiction and about the role of stylistic analysis in understanding genres diachronically. On the one hand, the article demonstrates that autofiction cannot be defined on the basis of formal and stylistic features alone; on the other, it shows that narratological and stylistic analysis, set against the background of generic transformations in the literary landscape more generally, enables a better understanding of how autofiction works in combination with as well as in opposition to established conventions.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143915969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The reader in the text across time and genres","authors":"Claudia Claridge","doi":"10.1177/09639470251327532","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470251327532","url":null,"abstract":"The development of uses of <jats:italic>reader</jats:italic> (third-person and vocative) are investigated in the Corpus of Late Modern English Text (1710-1920) with regard to frequencies and functions. Overall, <jats:italic>reader</jats:italic> declines, indicating a shift away from nominal and more formal style. Third-person uses are more common than vocatives, which cluster especially in the early nineteenth century and in emotive, personalized texts. A functional analysis is carried out on treatises and narrative fiction. Readers are positioned and (dis)aligned with the writer through the use of possessive pronouns, quantifiers and adjectives in contrast to bare unmodified uses. <jats:italic>Reader</jats:italic> occurrences may be explained as metadiscourse (Hyland, 2005) or intersubjective uses. They involve the reader in responsive thought or action with the text and steer them towards interpretations. They are also integrated into emotive and attitudinal contexts, in which overt attention is given to the face needs of the reader.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"31 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143915992","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The conventional organisation of request sequences in Scottish letters (1570–1750)","authors":"Christine Elsweiler","doi":"10.1177/09639470251327491","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470251327491","url":null,"abstract":"This study explores a possible change in politeness conventions in Scottish correspondence written between 1570 and 1750. It is hypothesised that longer request sequences, that is, macro-requests, will display a diachronic shift towards a more prominent use of addressee-oriented face-enhancing speech acts as supportive moves, for instance, compliments or thanking, which have been found to be typical of eighteenth-century politeness culture. While the findings show that macro-requests often include moves aimed at maintaining harmony between the correspondents, there is no apparent increase of face-enhancing addressee-oriented harmonising moves during the period under investigation. Instead, writer-oriented support strategies, such as commitments or apologies, prevail in request sequences featuring harmonising moves, thus suggesting continuity in politeness norms. Nevertheless, regarding the choice of individual support strategies, the decline of commitments towards the addressee in the eighteenth century may indicate a change of conventions towards a less deferential style. These findings for Scottish letters offer a first point of reference for future research into macro-request patterns based on a planned cross-varietal, pragmatically annotated corpus of eighteenth-century correspondence.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"61 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143916083","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reconfigured reality in scenarios of transformed identity, invasion and environmental threat: The diachronic exploration of recognition scenes in anglophone print and film narratives","authors":"Hilary Duffield","doi":"10.1177/09639470251332820","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470251332820","url":null,"abstract":"The paper presents key results in the diachronic analysis of recognition (Aristotle’s concept of <jats:italic>anagnorisis</jats:italic> ) in works of Anglophone narrative fiction and film. Its focus is on the developing cognitive diversity in the representation of character responses during the cognitive-emotional crux which occurs at the heart of the recognition scene. The three forms covered are the recognition of close relationships (generally of kinship), recognition of hostile invaders, and recognition of the human threat to the environment. In contrast to previous research, the examples are taken from a wide range of realist and non-realist genres. The analysis of invasion narratives involves the recognition of enmity; this is mentioned by Aristotle but has received far less attention; the recognition of anthropogenic environmental threat, and its telling absence in some human responses – dysanagnorisis –, is largely a more recent form. The overall timespan of the examples ranges from the Renaissance to contemporary film. Notably, the recognition of enmity and of threat become a more common form in narratives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with new examples in particular occurring in 1950s narratives. In the examples from the invasion narrative, key transformations in the representation of recognition in print versus film media, and in print-to-film adaptations, constitute an additional innovative focus of the paper. Overall, the representations of recognition studied are cognitively and emotionally diverse, with a marked growth in their ontological, emotional and cognitive complexity.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"103 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143915973","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Diachronic perspectives on digital reading culture: Crying readers from the age of sensibility to BookTok","authors":"Dorothee Birke","doi":"10.1177/09639470251330400","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470251330400","url":null,"abstract":"This article uses a diachronic approach to examine how on social media platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, readers of fiction discuss and also stage strong affects connected with their reading of ‘books that made me cry’. While this trend may seem to be generated wholly by the affordances of digital media, it will be examined in what interesting ways it also connects with the eighteenth-century vogue for sentimental reading. Considering three dimensions of reading that have often been sidelined in literary studies – reading as a physical process, as a communal activity and as a performance – the article presents in-depth analyses of representations of crying readers in both reading cultures. It pays special attention to the changing norms and values connected with reading, which manifest themselves in contemporary discourses on the reader in the respective centuries, such as ‘sentimental reading’ and ‘ugly crying’.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"48 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143915971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Chaucerian modernities: (De)-constructing literary history in The Canterbury Tales","authors":"Andrew James Johnston","doi":"10.1177/09639470251327483","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470251327483","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses Chaucer’s perspective on the ideological structures that inform the writing of literary history. In the first verses of the <jats:italic>Franklin’s Tale</jats:italic> , Chaucer first engenders and then deconstructs an – implicit – teleological narrative of literary history that links questions of genre, orality and history only to deconstruct, in almost the same breath, that very narrative by poetic means. Chaucer’s act of historical deconstruction is compared with the self-conscious strategies of raising questions of literary history as they are already to be found in the type of early Middle English romance he parodies in <jats:italic>Sir Thopas</jats:italic> . As this article argues, it is through this form of poetic meditation on the problems of literary history that Chaucer establishes a sense of his own modernity.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"74 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143915974","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Diachronicity: An issue shared between linguistics and literary studies","authors":"Monika Fludernik, Olga Timofeeva","doi":"10.1177/09639470251327482","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470251327482","url":null,"abstract":"Both linguists and literary scholars deal with change over time. This special issue approaches the question of diachronic development from a comparative perspective, contrasting the ways in which analysis of changes observable in literary texts over the centuries is handled in the realm of literary studies and how linguists discuss language-specific (dis)continuities from one period to the other. For instance, as is well known, generic modifications and repurposing frequently play an important role in literary studies, while linguists often focus on form versus function analysis. These methodological preferences are not exclusive to the two fields, however. The essays in this issue demonstrate how very similar questions and often comparable methodologies are employed by linguists and literary scholars, especially by representatives of historical pragmatics and narratologists, who share methodological assumptions about form and function analysis.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"31 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143915995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Towards a cognitive forensic stylistics: An intercoder reliability test for replicable feature finding in the Operation Heron corpus","authors":"Matthew Voice, Chloe Harrison, Tim Grant, Marcello Giovanelli","doi":"10.1177/09639470251337632","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470251337632","url":null,"abstract":"This paper reports an initial application of contemporary cognitive stylistics to forensic linguistic contexts. In both areas, a need has been identified for robust analyses. An intercoder reliability study was developed using data from a historic authorship analysis case involving single-authored hate mail. Exploring the applicability of Cognitive Grammar’s notion of construal as a reliable framework for describing salient features of the author’s style, this test examined the accuracy and consistency of descriptions of schematicity and specificity within the corpus, as applied by independent coders. Iterative coding and testing demonstrated that reliability was achievable, but depended upon a protocol developed through considerable definitional work, refining the concepts of specificity and elaboration as taken from Cognitive Grammar. Our findings support the idea that the identification of stylistic features can be rigorous, retrievable, and replicable, but also that a fuller system of coding will require a substantial research programme. Such an approach, bringing together contemporary stylistics and forensic authorship analysis, would be a productive collaboration between both disciplines and a valuable research method for verifiability in stylistics more generally. Content: Readers are advised that the letters analysed for this study contain offensive language, and that short quotes within this paper include racist and hateful language directed at particular groups.","PeriodicalId":45849,"journal":{"name":"Language and Literature","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2025-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143876092","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}