Stephen King’s Body Worlds: Language Conventions and Creativity in Depicting the Inner Body

The Inner Body is one of the most promising fields of research in Contemporary Cognitive Linguistics, as it gives the key to understanding the mechanisms enacted in conceptualizing non-evident or quasi-evident phenomena. It has become common practice to note the cognitive impenetrability of the Inner Body which stems from its unique phenomenological features. The experiencer finds him/ herself in a cognitive cul-de-sac and is completely lost for words when it comes to verbalizing events that occur in the internal milieu of the body. The culture the experiencer belongs to serves as a mediator by offering a certain set of ready-made verbal means. Conventional inner-body vocabulary, however limited in number and poor in content, bridges the gap between the global, non-discursive somatic experience and the linear character of the language. Though unable to cover all the multitude of sensations associated with the life of the Inner Body, it offers the experiencer certain landmarks directing his or her creativity in verbalizing inner-body experience so that the individual inner-body vocabularies are conceptually compatible and mutually understandable. The given paper traces the main tendencies in the development of conventional inner-body vocabulary drawing on horror fiction by S. King. The paper aims to reveal specific cognitive mechanisms that underlie King’s creativity and examines the ways in which the writer employs conventional language means and experiments with them, elaborating on common inner-body metaphors by creating new domains and combining different metaphorical models.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC

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