Style in Fiction Symposium, 11th March 2006
Mind Style 25 years on
Elena Semino
Lancaster University
Structure of talk
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Mind style in Style in Fiction
Fictional minds in contemporary narratology
Cognitive stylistics and mind style
Pragmatics and mind style
Corpus methods and mind style
Beyond ‘mind style’?
Mind style in Style in Fiction 1
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‘phenomenon sometimes called “world view”, but for
which we shall prefer Fowler’s term MIND STYLE […]:
Cumulatively, consistent structural options, agreeing in cutting the
presented world to one pattern or another, give rise to an
impression of a world-view, what I shall call a “mind style”.’
(Leech and Short 1981: 188)
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Application of the notion of mind style to authors,
narrators and characters.
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Cline from ‘normal’, ‘natural’, ‘uncontrived’ mind styles, to
‘unusual’ mind styles, ‘which clearly impose an unorthodox
conception of the fictional world’. (Leech and Short 1981:
189)
Mind style in Style in Fiction 2
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Discussion of lexis, syntax, transitivity, metaphor, and
other textual patterns (e.g. pronoun usage).
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Observation on characters’ mind styles:
‘Characters’ mind styles are more readily discernible
as odd: we accept quite easily that a character might
have a faulty or limited view of things, and of course
we often have the mind styles of other characters as
a comparative yardstick.’ (Leech and Short 1981:
202)
Fictional minds in narratology:
Monika Fludernik
‘Experientiality in narrative as reflected in narrativity
can therefore be said to combine a number of
cognitively relevant factors, most importantly those of
the presence of a human protagonist and her
experience of events as they impinge on her situation
and activities.’
‘[S]ince humans are conscious human beings, (narrative)
experientiality always implies – and sometimes
emphatically foregrounds- the protagonist’s
consciousness.’ (Fludernik 1996: 30)
Fictional minds in narratology:
Alan Palmer
‘My thesis is a fundamental one: narrative fiction is, in
essence, the presentation of fictional mental functioning.
[. . .] If I am right, then it follows that the study of the
novel is the study of fictional mental functioning and
also that the task of the theorist is to make explicit the
various means by which this phenomenon is studied and
analyzed.’ (Palmer 2004: 5)
‘The reader uses existing or prestored knowledge of
other minds in the actual world in order to process the
emergent knowledge that is supplied by fictional-minds
presentation.’ (Palmer 2004: 175)
Fictional minds in narratology:
Uri Margolin
‘There is no guarantee that individual CMF (Cognitive
Mental Functioning) as portrayed in a given fictional
narrative will possess any psychological reality, nor is it
required to do so. Nonetheless, cognitive-science
concepts and categories, including the overall scheme of
the basic areas of information processing and their
sequence, will in all probability be applicable to the
fictional individuals portrayed in literary narratives.’
(Margolin 2003: 274)
Margolin on ‘non-standard’ fictional
mental functioning
‘What is probably even more significant is the preference of much
literature for nonstandard forms of cognitive functioning, be they
rare or marginal, deviant, or involving a failure, breakdown, or lack
of standard patterns.’
‘But standard case or deviation according to whom? As it turns out,
(almost) all writers of fiction base their portrayal of mental
functioning on one version or another of what cognitivists term
‘folk psychology’, that is a socially constructed and shared
common-sense set of general views […].’
‘It is a shared model of this kind that enables the artist to portray
the mental functioning of a character in a way which would make
that character be considered standard or exceptional by a
readership. (Margolin 2003: 287)
Margolin ctd.
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Defamiliarising effect of presenting nonstandard
mental functioning.
‘The fictional presentation of cognitive
mechanisms in action, especially of their own
breakdown and failure, is itself a powerful
cognitive tool which may make us aware of
actual cognitive mechanisms, and, more
specifically, of our own mental functioning.’
(Margolin 2003: 278)
Halliday’s classic example of mind style:
Lok in Golding’s The Inheritors
1.
The stick began to grow shorter at both ends. Then it
shot out to full length again.
The dead tree by Lok’s ear acquired a voice.
‘Clop!’
His ears twitched and he turned to the tree. By his
face there had grown a twig: a twig that smelt of
other, and of goose, and of the bitter berries that
Lok’s stomach told him he must not eat. The twig had
a white bone at the end. There were hooks in the
bone and sticky brown stuff hung in the crooks. His
nose examined this stuff and did not like it.
Benji in Faulkner’s
The Sound and the Fury
2.
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces,
I could see them hitting. They were coming towards
where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster
was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took
the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the
flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and
the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along
the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and
we went along the fence and they stopped and we
stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster
was hunting in the grass.
(see also Bockting 1994 for an analysis)
An uncanny similarity
The procedure is actually quite simple. First you arrange items into
different groups. Of course one pile may be sufficient depending on
how much there is to do. If you have to go somewhere else due to
lack of facilities that is the next step; otherwise, you are pretty well
set. It is important not to overdo things. That is, it is better to do few
things at once than too many. In the short run it may not seem
important but complications can easily arise. A mistake can be
expensive as well. At first, the whole procedure may seem
complicated. Soon, however, it will become just another facet of life.
It is difficult to foresee any end to the necessity of this task in the
near future, but then, one can never tell. After the procedure is
completed one arranges the material into different groups again.
Then they can be put into their appropriate places. Eventually they
will be used once more and the whole cycle will have to be repeated.
However, that is part of life.
(Bransford and Johnson 1972: 722)
Schema theory and mind style 1
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Comprehension requires the availability and
activation of relevant schemata.
Schemata are activated via linguistic triggers
(‘headers’) that refer to central elements of the
relevant schema.
The absence of transparent headers in a text
may prevent the activation of the relevant
schema, and hence the comprehension of a text
(Margolin 2003 calls this ‘frame blocking’).
Schema theory and mind style 2
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The vocabulary choices in examples (1) and (2) are
made at a level of generality that initially impedes or
delays the activation of the relevant schema (Cf. the
‘washing clothes’ text).
The eventual activation of the relevant schema results
in comprehension on the reader’s part, but also in the
construction of a fictional mind who lacks that schema,
as well as the ability to recognise the limitations of their
own understanding.
Defamiliarising effects.
Bromden in Ken Kesey’s
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
3.
What the Chronics are – or most of us – are machines with flaws
inside that can’t be repaired, flaws born in, or flaws beat in over so
many years of the guy running head-on into solid things that by
the time the hospital found him he was bleeding rust in some
vacant lot.
4.
a factory for the Combine. It’s for fixing up mistakes made in the
neighborhoods and in the schools and in the churches, the
hospital is. When a completed product goes back into society, all
fixed up and good as new, better than new sometimes, it brings
joy to the Big Nurse’s heart; something that came in all twisted
different is now a functioning, adjusted component, a credit to the
whole outfit and a marvel to behold.
(see Semino and Swindlehurst 1996)
Cognitive metaphor theory
and mind style
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Cognitive metaphor theorists have argued that
conventional metaphorical patterns in language
(e.g. He’s not getting anywhere in his life) reflect
conventional patterns of thought, known as
‘conceptual metaphors’ (e.g. LIFE IS A
JOURNEY).
At the individual level, idiosyncratic
metaphorical patterns may reflect idiosyncratic
mental functioning (see also Kövecses 2005).
Metaphor and mind style contrasts:
Dickens’s Hard Times
5.
They went back into the booth, Sleary shutting the door to
keep intruders out. Bitzer, still holding the paralysed culprit by
the collar, stood in the Ring, blinking at his old patron through
the darkness of the twilight.
‘Bitzer,’ said Mr Gradgrind, broken down, and miserably
submissive to him, ‘have you a heart?’
‘The circulation, sir,’ returned Bitzer, smiling at the oddity
of the question, ‘couldn’t be carried on without one. No man,
sir, acquainted with the facts established by Harvey relating to
the circulation of the blood, can doubt that I have a heart.’
Difficulties with metaphor:
Chris in Haddon’s The Curious Incident
6.
The second main reason [why Chris finds people confusing] is
that people often talk using metaphors. These are examples of
metaphors
I laughed my socks off.
He was the apple of her eye. […]
[. . .] I think it [metaphor] should be called a lie because a pig is
not like a day and people do not have skeletons in their
cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in
my head it just confuses me […]. (pp. 19-20)
7.
And she said lots of things I didn’t understand, e.g. ‘I’m going
to hit the hay,’ and, ‘It’s brass monkeys out there,’ and ‘Let’s
rustle up some tucker.’ And I didn’t like it when she said things
like that because I didn’t know what she meant.
A gradual descent into insanity in
Woolf ’s Lappin and Lapinova
8.
But what did he look like? She glanced at him sideways. Well, when
he was eating toast he looked like a rabbit.
9.
But that was absurd. He was not a tame rabbit, whatever he was. […]
‘Lappin,’ she exclaimed suddenly; and gave a little cry as if she had
found the very word she looked for.
‘Lappin, Lappin, King Lappin,’ she repeated. It seemed to suit
him exactly; he was not Ernest, he was King Lappin. Why? She did
not know.
10.
Ernest put down the paper and helped her. There were the black
rabbits and the red; there were the enemy rabbits and the friendly.
There were the wood in which they lived and the outlying prairies
and the swamp. Above all there was King Lappin, who, far from
having only the one trick—that he twitched his nose—became as the
days passed an animal of the greatest character; Rosalind was always
finding new qualities in him. But above all he was a great hunter.
11.
‘To–day,’ said Ernest, twitching his nose as he bit the end off his
cigar, ‘he chased a hare.’ He paused; struck a match, and twitched again.
‘A woman hare,’ he added.
[…]
‘Ah, Lapinova,’ Rosalind murmured.
‘Is that what she’s called?’ said Ernest—‘the real Rosalind?’ He
looked at her. He felt very much in love with her.
12.
‘Oh, Ernest, Ernest!’ she cried, starting up in her chair.
‘Well, what’s up now?’ he asked briskly, warming his hands at the fire.
‘It’s Lapinova . . .’ she faltered, glancing wildly at him out of her great
startled eyes. ‘She’s gone, Ernest. I’ve lost her!’
Ernest frowned. He pressed his lips tight together. […]
‘Yes,’ he said at length. ‘Poor Lapinova. . .’ He straightened his tie at
the looking–glass over the mantelpiece.
‘Caught in a trap,’ he said, ‘killed,’ and sat down and read the
newspaper.
So that was the end of that marriage.
‘Blending’ and mind style in
Lappin and Lapinova
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Rosalind makes up a fantasy that can be seen as a ‘blend’
between her ‘real’ world and a series of alternative scenarios
containing rabbits, hares, kings and queens (Fauconnier and
Turner 2003).
She gradually becomes more and more dependent on this
fantasy world for coping with her reality (especially her marriage)
and for remaining sane. The blend becomes ‘entrenched’, and
much of her mental life takes place within it.
Ernest’s declaration that Rosalind’s counterpart in the blend is
dead causes ‘the end of that marriage’.
(see Semino 2006)
Communicative behaviour
and mind style in The Curious Incident
13.
Then the police arrived. I like the police. They have uniforms and
numbers and you know what they are meant to be doing. There was a
policewoman and a policeman. The policewoman had a little hole in her
tights on her left ankle and a red scratch in the middle of the hole. The
policeman had a big orange leaf stuck to the bottom of his shoe which
was poking out from one side.
The policewoman put her arms round Mrs Shears and led her back
towards the house.
I lifted my head off the grass.
The policeman squatted down beside me and said, ‘Would you like to
tell me what’s going on here, young man?’
I sat up and said, ‘The dog is dead.’
‘I’d got that far,’ he said.
I said, ‘I think someone killed the dog.’
‘How old are you?’ he asked.
I replied, ‘I am 15 years and 3 months and 2 days.
Grice’s CP and mind style:
infringements
‘A speaker who, with no intention of generating an implicature
and with no intention of deceiving, fails to observe a maxim is
said to “infringe” the maxim. […] This type of non-observance
could occur because the speaker has an imperfect command of
the language (a young child or a foreign learner), because the
speaker’s performance is impaired in some way (nervousness,
drunkenness, excitement), because of some cognitive
impairment, or simply because the speaker is constitutionally
incapable of speaking clearly, to the point, etc.’ (Thomas 1995:
74)
Level of detail and deautomatisation
14.
And there were signs saying Great Western and cold
beers and lagers and CAUTION WET FLOOR
and Your 50p will keep a premature baby alive for
1.8 seconds and transforming travel and
Refreshingly Different and IT’S DELICIOUS
IT’S CREAMY AND IT’S ONLY £1.30 HOT
CHOC DELUXE and 0870 777 7676 and The
Lemon Tree and No Smoking and FINE TEAS
and there were some little tables with chairs next to
them and no one was sitting at one of the tables and it
was in a corner and I sat down on one of the chairs
next to it and I closed my eyes.
Politeness phenomena and mind style:
The Modesty Maxim in The Curious Incident
15.
My name is Christopher John Francis Boone. I know
all the countries of the world and their capital cities
and every prime number up to 7,507.
16.
I think I would make a very good astronaut.
To be a good astronaut you have to be intelligent
and I am intelligent. You also have to understand how
machines work and I’m good at understanding how
machines work.
Politeness phenomena and mind style:
Face-threatening acts in The Curious Incident
17.
I also said that I cared about dogs because they were
faithful and honest, and some dogs were cleverer and
more interesting than some people. Steve, for
example, who comes to school on Thursdays, needs
help to eat his food and could not even fetch a stick.
Siobhan asked me not to say this to Steve’s mother.
18.
And I walked into to the ticket office [. . .] there was a
long desk at the other side of the big room and a
window on the desk and there was a man standing in
front of the window and there was a man behind the
window, and I said to the man behind the window, ‘I
want to go to London.’
Corpus-based approaches to (literary)
text analysis and mind style
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The top five ‘keywords’ in Haddon’s The Curious Incident
are: and, I, because, said, then.
The verbs feel and felt are followed by adjectives drawn
from a very small set: calm, scared, sick, safe, giddy.
In Chris’s narrative, the pronoun we is only used with
actions (e.g. we went), except in cases of the ‘generic’ we
(i.e. Chris does not use expressions such as we saw, we
decided, we felt).
Linguistic evidence and
characters’ mind styles
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First-person narration
Internal psychological viewpoint
Thought presentation
Speech presentation
Patterns of lexis, grammar, metaphor,
transitivity, conversational behaviour, etc.
Beyond ‘mind style’? 1
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Fowler introduced ‘mind style’ as a paraphrase of ‘point
of view on the ideological plane’. He also used the term
‘world view’.
Subsequent studies have tended to privilege one or the
other of the two terms. In Style in Fiction, the term
‘mind style’ is used.
In Semino and Swindlehurst (1996) and Semino (2002),
it was suggested that ‘mind style’ and ‘ideological point
of view’ could be used to capture different aspects of
world views. However, this distinction can be difficult
to apply and can be easily misunderstood.
Beyond ‘mind style’? 2
Study of (the textual projection of) fictional minds,
including:
 World view = the combination of a fictional
individual’s mental representations of the ‘reality’ they
inhabit, including both knowledge and attitudes, and
both socially shared and personal elements (e.g. van
Dijk 2002; see also Fanlo Piniés 2006).
 Fictional mental functioning = a fictional individual’s
mental processes, including both cognition and
emotion, and both ‘standard’ and ‘nonstandard’
elements (see Margolin 2003, Palmer 2004)
References
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Bockting, I. (1994) Character and Personality in the Novels of William Faulkner:
A Study in Psychostylistics. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press.
Bransford, J.D. and Johnson, M.K. (1972) ‘Contextual prerequisites for
understanding: some investigations of comprehension and recall’, Journal of
Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour, 11, 717-26
Fanlo Piniés. M (2006) The Minds and Mental Selves of Characters in Prose Fiction,
Unpublished PhD thesis, Lancaster University.
Fauconnier, G. and Turner, M. (2002) The Way We Think: Conceptual Blendings
and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.Fludernik, M.
(1996) Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge.
Kövecses, Z. (2005) Metaphor in Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Margolin, U. (2003) ‘Cognitive Science, the Thinking Mind, and Literary
Narrative’, in D. Herman (ed.) Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, pp.
271-94. Stanford, Ca.: Center for the Study of Language and Information.
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Palmer, A. (2004) Fictional Minds. Lincoln and London: University of
Nebraska Press.
Semino, E. (2002) ‘A cognitive stylistic approach to mind style in
narrative fiction’, in Semino, E. and Culpeper, J. (eds.) Cognitive Stylistics:
Language and Cognition in Text Analysis, John Benjamins, 95-122
Semino, E. (2006) ‘Blending and characters’ mental functioning in
Virginia Woolf ’s Lappin and Lapinova’, Language and Literature, 15, 1, 5572.
Semino, E. and Swindlehurst, K. (1996) ‘Metaphor and mind style in
Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, Style, 30, 1, 143-166.
Thomas, J. (1995) Meaning in Interaction, London: Longman.
Van Dijk, T. (2002) ‘Ideology: political discourse and cognition’, in
Chilton, P. and Schäffner, C. (eds) Politics as Talk and Text, Amsterdam:
John Benjamins, 203-37.