We more or less agreed that this was unsatisfactory if we wanted to preserve the concept of metaphor. We then considered, among other formulations, Shakespeare’s ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps on this petty pace …’ and ‘Life is an orangutan’. Both conform to the grammatical conventions of metaphor (as distinct from simile), although they seem to operate in different ways. Shakespeare seems to be taking the LIFE IS A JOURNEY concept and rendering it more memorable through compression and rhythmical ingenuity, and it may be that much of Macbeth is structured through this overarching concept. ‘Life is an orangutan’ is more problematic. However, it invites the interlocutor to struggle to find the similarities between the ‘ground’ LIFE and the figure ORANGUTAN.
We more or less agreed, then, that the basic premises of cognitive grammar, etc. were an accurate representation of how languages were structured but that different cultures conceptualised our experiences in different ways, hence the concept of ‘dead’ metaphors had some residual meaning in that certain concepts were taken for granted, although in the hands of great writers (e.g., Shakespeare) they could be revivified so that we pay them attention. However, we chose to reserve the term metaphor to describe those comparisons which were initially surprising or even apparently incomprehensible, e.g., Life is an orangutan. Nevertheless, we were left with a number of loose ends (another ‘dead’ metaphor?) which needed further investigation.
Sperber &威尔逊的关联理论给我的印象更有说服力，因为它认识到听众/读者只激活那些似乎与他们相关的东西。这样的观点允许不同的阅读和解释，同时也为精明的批评家留下了空间，通过展示他/她的解释如何被特定的含义所证明，来支持特定的解释
在回复tb301。
同意，托尼。学生& # 8211;来吧，尤其是。我会将本博客的详细内容通过电子邮件发给任何可能感兴趣的人
Is ‘Creating fictional contexts’ in Emmott (1997: chapter 4) of any help for narrative comprehension of large intervening texts such as event lines in ‘The Good soldier’? Does the cognitive approach suggested in Emmott stands up to this challenge?
I use the term event line as in time line, where progression of a specific event is addressed in relation to configuration of characters (episodic information) at any one point in the narrative. As part of the fictional context, readers have to build on their information, or update their mental information to keep track of twists and turns, switches and shifts in the complex story line.
The story line in fiction is complex. Event narration may be suspended for background description, or the narration of a new event may start when previous event is still suspended, creating thereby simultaneous contextual frames in the narrative. There is a need for mental processing of assumptions that goes hand in hand with progression of the physical events in the story. Linking these non-sequential frames/events, at times, seemingly appear as isolated events, and it is difficult to link them to the setting or episode as part of the story hierarchy.
The question is, could Emmott’s (1997: p. 104, 114) ‘context’ (not just physical location, but details of participant present in that location and … other salient information about the context) creating process help keep the activated event shifts in reader memory, help to ‘keep track of ‘ character intentions left suspended, ‘keep track of’ the configuration of characters when there is switch to another contextual frame, or when an active frame/event may be backgrounded to bring another character and event into reader’s focus of attention?
My response to this is, yes, as Emmott’s context creating process is about complexities of context representation (p. 107), is about shifts and switches with configuration of character, location and time at any one point and about context-based inferences to make sense of the fictional world (contextual frame/frame (p. 121)) in the narrative. This is in contrast to information the reader remembers a particular character or location for character or location representation (entity representation (p. 122)). So reader awareness, according to Emmott, comes not from senses, but from mental monitoring of current context (p. 118), and from mental monitoring of inferences relating to a situation or character in a specific context. By monitoring and subsequently organising these contexts, my view is that the comprehension process is made more accessible.
In addition the reader also needs to make inferences about what is not mentioned, to understand a story fully (1997: 105). For example, the ‘communicative contract’ between a writer and the reader (p. 120) when breached, as in flouting of Grice’s maxim of quantity, limits the reader‘s inference making process. The reader tries to make sense of what is assumed but not focused, to take account of actions having indirect consequences, and contextualise the information that pales into insignificance in the fictional narrative to try and work out its significance in the narrative comprehension of the story.
Emmott’s contextual monitoring of specific contexts (e.g. restricted context, overlapping restricted contexts) is about keeping track of continuity and changes, character intentions and assumptions made, and ellipsis as contextual gaps. Contextual monitoring is an active form of memory, where facts about immediate context (episodic information), as well as general information outside immediate context are stored. But the reader needs to separate the types of text-derived information in the narrative, like the descriptive from the specific, the backgrounded from the foregrounded. As Emmott suggests,
‘Somehow the brain must be able to make these distinctions, but until we have some proper understanding of the mind-brain connection, we can only provide models of how information processing might be achieved.’ (1997: 122)
My final take on the question I started with is this. The information-processing tasks suggested, (chapters 4- 6), is related to prose fiction which makes possible narrative comprehension of large stretches of intervening text.
Emmott’s model refers to artificial intelligence and Relevance Theory.
To argue this further, we will be contesting Emmott’s Relevance theory (1997: C7) with Relevance theory in Sperber and Wilson (1995) in our next reading group meeting on 26th March.
Dear ‘Stylistic reading group member’ I look forward to your comments on this blog …..
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