Jane Lugea

Bio: Jane Lugea is an academic researcher from Queen's University Belfast. The author has contributed to research in topics: Narrative & Psychology. The author has an hindex of 6, co-authored 20 publications receiving 91 citations. Previous affiliations of Jane Lugea include University of Huddersfield.

The year’s work in stylistics 2016:

Abstract: 2016 was imbued with a sense of shifting sands in global politics, characterised by very little security in the old or – perhaps more accurately – a sense that tradition can take surprising new forms. In a way, browsing through the titles published in stylistics in 2016 gives the same sense, albeit with altogether more positive developments. I will try to explain what I mean, first looking at the solid foundations on which these changes are wrought. With the recent publication of two discipline-defining handbooks (Burke, 2014; Stockwell and Whiteley, 2014) and a comprehensive compendium (Sotirova, 2015) the contemporary field of stylistics has been very clearly set out. There is general agreement in the remit of research in stylistics, as well as in the eclecticism that it embodies. Sorlin’s cross-referencing review of these three volumes, published in Language and Literature last year (Issue 3), makes this harmonious agreement clear, leading her to conclude that stylistics has matured and is indeed in ‘good shape’. Reflecting on an outdated suggestion that stylistics lacks an ‘autonomous domain of its own’ (Widdowson, 1975: 3) and that it is a method of analysis rather than a discipline, Sorlin asserts that in the intervening decades stylisticians have succeeded in creating a domain of their own, as evidenced by the publication of these comprehensive volumes. It is against that background of disciplinary health and energy that I undertake to review subsequent publications in the field, which both contribute to and develop the lay of the land. However, I would venture to surmise that as a result of the sense of confidence in ‘our domain’, stylisticians are engaging more fully in the interdisciplinary work that has always been at the core of this eclectic field. In the opening lines of her

The effects of deaf and hard-of-hearing subtitles on the characterisation process: a cognitive stylistic study of The Wire

Abstract: This article reports on a project to investigate the discrepancies between audio dialogue and corresponding subtitles for deaf and hard-of hearing (DHOH) viewers in episode 1 of HBO's police procedural drama The Wire. We isolated and categorised discrepancies between the dialogue and the subtitles and used a cognitive model of characterisation to determine whether such differences were likely to lead to differing conceptions of character for DHOH viewers. We found that most omissions from the subtitles were of interpersonal features of dialogue, such as discourse markers, and that indications of the relationships between characters were adversely affected as a result. We suggest that the model of characterisation that we used can be valuable to professional subtitlers as a way of assessing the likely impact of deletions when subtitling drama.

Embedded dialogue and dreams: the worlds and accessibility relations of Inception

Abstract: In this article, Text World Theory (Gavins, 2007; Werth, 1999) and Ryan’s model of fictional worlds (1991a, 1991b) are both applied to Nolan’s blockbuster film, Inception (2010) to explore the mult...

The year’s work in stylistics 2017:

Abstract: The year 2017 was one of deictic exploration for stylistics, whereby through exploring the spatio-temporal contours of our discipline we reach a better understanding of where we are now. My point is demonstrated in this section, where I cover retrospectives and reprints of past work in stylistics (Burke, 2017; Fowler, 1966/2017), as well as a new textbook for the instruction of future stylisticians (Gibbons and Whiteley, 2017) and a volume which sketches out the current ‘landscape’ of stylistics (Douthwaite et al., 2017). In the subsequent sections, I consider this landscape under arbitrary headings for the purposes of toponymy which, as Brian Friel’s play Translations reminds us, can be political, but is nonetheless necessary for finding one’s way around a field. As always, articles published in this journal are not included in the list of references to avoid self-citation predicaments, but readers are signposted to the relevant issue of Language and Literature where they are encouraged to read more. I knew I had my work cut out for me this year when the weighty four-volume Stylistics (Burke, 2017) landed on my desk. A major reference work reprinting key publications spanning almost sixty years in four hardback volumes, it is part of Routledge’s ‘Critical Concepts in Linguistics’ series. As such, it joins the ranks of other sub-disciplines of linguistics featured in the series, including Pragmatics (Kasher, 1998), Critical Discourse Analysis (Toolan, 2002), and Sociolinguistics (Coopland and Jaworski, 2009). Last year I referred to the publication of several handbooks of stylistics in recent years (Burke, 2014; Sotirova, 2015; Stockwell and Whiteley, 2014) as an indication of disciplinary

World-building in Spanish and English Spoken Narratives

Abstract: 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 children's 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.

Analyzing linguistic data: a practical introduction to statistics using R

Abstract: The complete title of this book runs ‘Analyzing Linguistic Data: A Practical Introduction to Statistics using R’ and as such it very well reflects the purpose and spirit of the book. The author guides the reader in about 350 pages from descriptive and basic statistical methods over classification and clustering to (generalised) linear and mixed models. Each of the methods is introduced in the context of concrete linguistic problems and demonstrated on exciting datasets from current research in the language sciences. In line with its practical orientation, the book focuses primarily on using the methods and interpreting the results. This implies that the mathematical treatment of the techniques is held at a minimum if not absent from the book. In return, the reader is provided with very detailed explanations on how to conduct the analyses using R [1]. The first chapter sets the tone being a 20-page introduction to R. For this and all subsequent chapters, the R code is intertwined with the chapter text and the datasets and functions used are conveniently packaged in the languageR package that is available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). With this approach, the author has done an excellent job in enabling researchers and students alike to reproduce the analyses and learn by doing. Another quality as a textbook is the fact that every chapter ends with Workbook sections where the user is invited to exercise his or her analysis skills on supplemental datasets. Full solutions including code, results and comments are given in Appendix A (30 pages). Instructors are therefore very well served by this text, although they might want to balance the book with some more mathematical treatment depending on the target audience. After the introductory chapter on R, the book opens on graphical data exploration. Chapter 3 treats probability distributions and common sampling distributions. Under basic statistical methods (Chapter 4), distribution tests and tests on means and variances are covered. Chapter 5 deals with clustering and classification. Strangely enough, the clustering section has material on PCA, factor analysis, correspondence analysis and includes only one subsection on clustering, devoted notably to hierarchical partitioning methods. The classification part deals with decision trees, discriminant analysis and support vector machines. The regression chapter (Chapter 6) treats linear models, generalised linear models, piecewise linear models and a substantial section on models for lexical richness. The final chapter on mixed models is particularly interesting as it is one of the few text book accounts that introduce the reader to using the (innovative) lme4 package of Douglas Bates which implements linear mixed-effects models. Moreover, the case studies included in this