Bloomsbury World Building in Spanish and English Spoken Narratives (Advances in Stylistics)

Text World Theory is a powerful framework for discourse analysis that, thus far, has only been used in monolingual Anglophone stylistic analyses. This work adapts Text World Theory for the analysis of Spanish discourse, and in doing so suggests some improvements to the way in which it deals with discourse - in particular, with direct speech and conditional expressions. Furthermore, it applies Text World Theory in a novel way, searching not for style in language, but for the style of a language. Focusing principally on deixis and modality, the author examines whether Spanish speakers and English speakers construct the narrative text-world in any patterned ways. To do so, the frog story methodology is employed, eliciting spoken narratives from native adult speakers of both languages by means of a childrens picture book. These narratives are transcribed and subjected to a qualitative text-world analysis, which is supported with a quantitative corpus analysis. The results reveal contrasts in Spanish and English speakers use of modality and deixis in building the same narrative text-world, and are relevant to scholars working in language typology, cross-cultural pragmatics and translation studies. These novel applications of the Text World Theory push the boundaries of stylistics in new directions, broadening the focus from monolingual texts to languages at large. Review I fully support the commissioning of this title for the following reasons. The book makes a significant advance in text world theory by solving a methodological problem concerned with diagramming complex text worlds. It deals with the stylistics of a language other than English; this makes it unique in stylistics. Nonetheless, the inclusion of a contrastive element in which Spanish is compared against English means that it will appeal equally to researchers focusing on the stylistics of English. Finally, the book deals with spoken narratives which is again unusual for stylistics. Speech is usually avoided by stylisticians because of the complexity of collecting data. The fact that this book tackles this issue head on will make it stand out significantly. --Professor Dan McIntyre, University of Huddersfield, UK About the Author Jane Lugea is Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the University of Huddersfield, UK