Mind Style Essay

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Mind style is the term traditionally discussed in stylistics to refer to the linguistic features that project the peculiarities of characters’ cognitive make-up. As stylistics mainly focuses on written forms, mind style has generally been discussed in relation to its textual manifestations although new research is emerging which is redressing this lack (Gibbons 2010; Nørgaard 2010). When considering textual forms, scholars identify many and varied linguistic indicators as markers of mind style. MEANING AND WORLD VIEW Leech and Short’s discussion of mind style is based on a fundamental distinction between a (fictional) “world” and a “world view”: the fictional world is what is apprehended, whereas our present concern is with how that world is apprehended, or conceptualized. Leech and Short go on to state that they will adopt Fowler’s term “mind style” in preference to “world view” and provide a quotation from Fowler that spells out how mind styles are projected via systematic linguistic and textual patterns: [c]umulatively, 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.” (“Linguistics and the Novel” 76) The rest of Leech and Short’s chapter develops Fowler’s original intuition and application in a number of significant ways. First, Leech and Short point out that the notion of mind style can be applied at all levels of what they later call the “discourse structure” of novels, so that it is possible to study the mind styles of authors, narrators and characters. They also note that, in 2 principles at least, the concept of mind style potentially applies to all texts, since “even in apparently normal pieces of writing, the writer slants us towards a particular “mental set”. This leads Leech and Short to demonstrate the possibility of
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