Text World Theoretical Approach To Mental Representation And Stylistic Effects

Along with the emergence and development of nonfictional writing during the recent years, the vast majority of which is presence writing, the pattern of the literary circle in our country is changing. Many excellent works belonging to this genre of literature are published, and nonfictional writing will gradually share the market with fictional writing in the near future. Winter Pasture(2012) written by Li Juan, as a presence writing, is one of the representatives of nonfictional writing, which depicts Li Juan’s experience of entering into winter pasture in Altay district of Xinjiang with a Kazakh family in the winter of 2010. Since its publication, due to its prominent and unique features such as being nonfictional, experiential, authentic, intimate, fresh and so on, it is highly spoken by many professional writers and many ordinary readers. Furthermore, in the field of academics, some researches are conducted on Winter Pasture(2012) from the perspectives of literature, anthropology, aesthetics, and ecology.Based on some theories in Cognitive Linguistics including ICMs and Mental Space Theory, Text World Theory originates and develops within the reign of Cognitive Stylistics. It focuses on the formation of mental representation in readers’ minds when they conceptualize language and the configuration of their mental representation. Text World Theory consists of three world layers, discourse-world, text-world and world-switch, which can be applied to explore the establishment of mental representation of readers when they read Winter Pasture(2012) and to figure out the output after the integration of these mental representation as stylistic effects of it in a cognitive way.This thesis tries to answer two research questions. The first one is how readers’ mental representation is realized when they read Winter Pasture(2012) according to the three world layers of Text World Theory; the second one is what the stylistic effects of Winter Pasture(2012) are according to Text World Theory. In this thesis, readers’ mental representation of Winter Pasture(2012) is investigated in three world layers including discourse-worlds, text-worlds and world-switches with theoretical analysis firstly. In the layer of discourse-world, it is analyzed that readers and Li Juan, the author of Winter Pasture(2012), are participants existing in a split discourse world while existing in the same cognitive domain or the same text-world through readers’ projection and self-implication. In the layer of text-world, sense of simplicity, sense of participation, the sense of imagery, sense of distance, sense of humor and sense of presence are formed in readers’ mental representation when they read world-building elements of event description, character description, dialogue description and scenery description in Winter Pasture(2012) respectively. The distribution of function-advancing propositions along with Li Juan’s dual identity and the first person narration used in Winter Pasture(2012) gives prominence to Li Juan and function-advancing propositions conducted by her in readers’ minds so that they shift their perspectives to enactor or spectator the same as Li Juan. In the layer of world-switch, when readers enter into direct speech as a world-switch, they will hold different perspectives and different degrees of reliability towards different enactors. Thus, readers establish an overall mental representation by integrating world-building elements and function-advancing propositions together with incrementation process and inference process. Then, a survey is conducted to verify and affirm the former theoretical analysis. The survey is carried out to 50 survey subjects by questionnaires and the data collected are analyzed via SPSS. On the foundation of the survey result, three representatives of the survey subjects are selected to conduct interviews respectively. In the end, based on the results gained from theoretical analysis and the survey, several stylistic effects of Winter Pasture(2012) are proposed cognitively and stylistically from the perspective of Text World Theory, including authentic effect, lifestyle effect, intimacy effect, mixture of dynamics and statics effect, fresh effect and ethnic effect.The significance of the present thesis is that first the formation of readers’ mental representation when they read Winter Pasture(2012), as an nonfictional writing and a presence writing, and its stylistic effects are revealed in the three world layers respectively from the perspective of Text World Theory, which, to some extent, figure out the cognitive mechanism behind the high evaluation and similar reader responses from those professional writers and ordinary readers about the book. Secondly, this thesis provides some aspiration for other researches which make attempt to study literary-text as a whole based on Text World Theory, which expands the range of application of it. Thirdly, this thesis also reminds other researches to take the relationship of human language and human mind into consideration when they analyze a literary work instead of being restricted to the field of literature. Last but not the least, nonfictional writing, especially presence writing, is proposed as an interesting study target for Cognitive Linguistics.