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"The relationship between language and literature is a contentious issue. On the one hand, it may simply be described as a relationship between raw material and a finished product - language provides the basis on which creative and unique works of literature emerge. On the other hand, once we look at meaning, the dividing lines begin to fade - it is difficult to define a sharp boundary separating the meaning of literary works and the meaning of other texts. One way of downplaying the obvious links is to claim that fiction engages knowledge much broader and culturally specific than every-day use of language does. But that would be an exaggeration. One could not follow an ordinary discussion of, say, climate change if one did not have any prior knowledge of the issue"-- "How do we read stories? How do they engage our minds and create meaning? Are they a mental construct, a linguistic one or a cultural one? What is the difference between real stories and fictional ones? This book addresses such questions by describing the conceptual and linguistic underpinnings of narrative interpretation. Barbara Dancygier discusses literary texts as linguistic artifacts, describing the processes which drive the emergence of literary meaning. If a text means something to someone, she argues, there have to be linguistic phenomena that make it possible. Drawing on blending theory and construction grammar, the book focuses its linguistic lens on the concepts of the narrator and the story, and defines narrative viewpoint in a new way. The examples come from a wide spectrum of texts, primarily novels and drama, by authors such as William Shakespeare, Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, Dave Eggers, Jan Potocki and Mikhail Bulgakov"-- 2.2.1 Sentential level versus textual level2.3 Narrative spaces -- an example; 2.3.1 Narrative anchors; 2.3.2 Anchoring: representation blends and frames; 2.3.3 Reference and story construction; 2.4 Emergent story; 2.4.1 Sequence of events and the story; 2.4.2 Story construction, vital relations, and optimality constraints; 3 Stories and their tellers; 3.1 Narrators, narrative spaces, and viewpoint; 3.2 Types of teller and epistemic viewpoint; 3.2.1 On-stage narrators; 3.2.2 Off-stage narrators; 3.2.3 Omniscience and narratorship; 3.2.4 Tense, person, and distancing. 3.2.5 Constructional compositionality3.3 Second-person narratives; 3.4 The teller, the author, and the character; 3.5 Multiple tellers; 3.6 Narrative space embedding; 3.7 Narrative viewpoint and narrative spaces; 4 Viewpoint: representation and compression; 4.1 Viewpoint and representation; 4.2 Viewpoint compression; 4.3 Decompression for viewpoint; 4.4 Fictive vision, causation, and change; 4.5 The micro level, the macro level, and viewpoint compression; 4.6 Speech, thought, and multiple levels of representation; 4.7 Narrative thought and intersubjectivity. 5 Referential expressions and narrative spaces5.1 Compression, decompression, and cross-space mappings; 5.2 Proper names, frame metonymy, and the status of a character; 5.3 Role-value mappings as cross-space connectors; 5.4 Common nouns; 5.5 Personal pronouns, viewpoint, and the narrator; 5.5.1 Mixing person and tense; 5.5.2 Pronouns and narratorship; 5.6 Deictic I and the construal of subjectivity; 6 Fictional minds and embodiment in drama and fiction; 6.1 Deictic ground in literary discourse; 6.2 Mental spaces, physical spaces, and dramatic narratives. 6.3 Materiality of the stage and fictional minds6.3.1 Narration on the stage; 6.3.2 The vertical dimension of the stage and representation of mental states; 6.3.3 Material objects and the human mind on the stage; 6.3.4 Ghosts and other supernatural occurrences on the stage; 6.4 From dramatic narratives to novelistic narratives; 6.5 Fictional minds, bodies, and brains; 7 Speech and thought in the narrative; 7.1 Types of discourse spaces in the narrative; 7.2 Speaking for thinking; 7.3 Levels of embedding in thought representation; 7.4 Viewpoint compression and constructional compositionality. Cover; The Language of Stories; Title; Copyright; for Jacek and Szymek; Contents; Figures; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1 Language and literary narratives; 1.1 Where does narrative meaning come from?; 1.2 Literary analysis and linguistic analysis; 1.3 Literature, language, and human nature; 1.4 Literary texts and communication; 1.5 Why is fiction special?; 1.6 Narrative and grounding; 1.7 Approaching narratives; 2 Blending, narrative spaces, and the emergent story; 2.1 Applying blending to fictional narratives; 2.2 Narrative spaces as mental spaces.
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