Construing Horrific Uncertainty: A Cognitive Stylistic Analysis of Stephen King’s The Shining

Document Type : Research in linguistic and literary studies

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Faculty of Al-Alsun, Minia University

Abstract

This paper aims to provide a text-based cognitive stylistic account of how lexical choices made by authors construe uncertainty; a prerequisite of the horror genre plot and the driving force behind its advancement (Carroll, 1990). Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) recounts the story of how Jack Torrance, a wannabe-writer and a recovering alcoholic, slowly descends into madness as he develops an urge to kill his son and wife when the family moves to the Overlook, a remote haunted hotel, to be its caretakers during the off season. Through adopting Langacker (2008)’s Cognitive Grammar as the prime tool of analysis, this paper pays particular attention to how the construal operation of selection is exploited by the author to cause a semantic conflict and heighten the sense of uncertainty in the readers until they arrive to it at the end and reconcile the conflict they have been subject to along with the novel’s denouement.

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