Mind style

Stylistics aims to explain how literary and non-literary texts achieve their rhetorical effects, drawing on a range of approaches from within linguistics as well as other disciplines (e.g. cognitive sciences, narratology, literary theory and rhetoric). Fundamental to stylistic enquiry is the idea that style is forged when authors make patterned choices, contributing towards a distinctive ‘style’; when that style is indicative of a way of thinking, it becomes ‘mind style’. Many readers of fiction will be familiar with the feeling of ‘getting inside the mind’ of a character, of seeing the fictional world the way they do, especially notable if that viewpoint is marked, or unusual. For several decades now, stylistic research has explored how different ‘mind styles’ are constructed through the patterned linguistic choices made by authors. This chapter begins with an overview of the kinds of texts that offer mind styles, and the kinds of mind styles that have been identified in stylistic research (Section 1). It then goes on to outline the historical development of the concept, with reference to illustrative examples. Indeed, the development of ‘mind style’ reflects the development of Stylistics, which like this chapter, starts with a focus on formal, lexico-grammatical patterns (Section 2), which are readily identifiable using corpora (Section 3). It then goes on to incorporate the rise of pragmatics (Section 4) and discourse-level approaches (Section 5), as well as the ‘cognitive turn’ (Section 6) in mind style studies.