| “Mind style” refers to individual’s consistent and idiosyncratic ways of perceiving and conceptualizing the world which can be reflected by his/her frequent, particular language patterns. Since Roger Fowler’s proposition in 1977, it has attracted intensive attention from two major schools, i.e. the linguistic analysis school represented by Leech and Short, and the cognitive analysis school headed by Semino and Swindlehurst. The former covers general structure, lexis, syntax, and textual relations while the latter refers to the applications of metaphor theory, schema theory and blending theory. The linguistic analysis has the advantage of analyzing objectively and meticulously, but it often ignores the deep connection.The cognitive analysis focuses on internal connection which allows researchers to understand work and character broadly, but it pays less attention to the detail. Thus, considering their complementary advantages, Semino(2002, 2007), Liu Shisheng and Cao Jinmei(2006),Gong Yingrui(2009) and many other scholars, claim that the best way for analyzing mind style is to combine linguistic and cognitive approaches. The thesis agrees on the combined analysis of mind style.To conduct the combined analysis, the thesis chooses Alamaba Beggs, the protagonist in the autobiographical novel Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald, as the research target.Related corpora are built by means of Text Editor3.0 and two corpus tools, Ant Conc3.2.4w and Readability Analyzer 1.0 are adopted. By employing both quantitative and qualitative analysis, the thesis probes into the following questions:(1) What are the linguistic patterns on lexical, syntactic, textual levels?(2) What are the cognitive metaphorical patterns?(3) How can MS be reflected by linguistic and cognitive metaphorical patterns? The first question is studied under the theoretical framework of Leech and Short; the second question follows the theoretical framework of Semino and Swindlehurst; answers to the third question lie in the analysis of the first two questions.Based on both quantitative and qualitative studies, the thesis finds that Alabama’s lexical patterns include her frequent usage of stance markers, abstract nouns, sensory lexicon and plant words; the syntactic patterns contain her frequent usage of complex sentences,parallelisms, if-conditional sentences and interrogatives; and the textual patterns cover thecohesive and coherent characteristics. As for her cognitive metaphorical patterns, they refer to her unconventional usage of conventional metaphors including anthropomorphic and animal metaphors, and the idiosyncratic implied metaphorical systems of “warfare” and “swing”. By means of all these patterns, her mind style is reflected, i.e. she is a complex, contradictory individual who has peculiar, poetic, metaphorical, logical, yet fragmented mind style.The above research findings have significance in two aspects. Theoretically speaking,they can testify the feasibility of the combined theoretical framework. Practically speaking,they fill in a gap in domestic studies of the novel Save Me the Waltz.The thesis includes five chapters. Chapter One presents introduction of the background,purpose and significance of the study as well as organization of the thesis. Chapter Two is literature review related to mind style and the novel. Chapter Three focuses on the theoretical framework and methodology. Chapter Four includes studies of Alabama’s consistent use of linguistic patterns and cognitive metaphors. Chapter Five summarizes the major findings,limitations and suggestions for further study. |
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