Opposition In Discourse The Construction of Oppositional Meaning

by Jeffries, Lesley

• ISBN13: 9781847065124
• ISBN10: 1847065120
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-03-26
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

Lesley Jeffries introduces a phenomenon which has not been given the attention it deserves - the contextual construction of oppositional meaning.

Author Biography

Professor Lesley Jeffries is at the University of Huddersfield, UK. She is the Chair of Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) and Director of the Stylistics Research Centre.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. ix
What are opposites?	p. 1
Introduction	p. 1
Opposition: a history of ideas	p. 7
Opposition in logic and maths	p. 12
Opposition in language	p. 14
Contextual features of opposition	p. 23
Structure of the book	p. 26
How opposites are constructed in texts and what they mean	p. 28
Introduction	p. 28
Earlier studies of opposition in context	p. 29
Structural triggers of opposition	p. 32
Lexical triggers of opposition	p. 47
Meanings and local textual functions of constructed opposition	p. 52
Literary effects of constructed opposition	p. 54
Introduction - opposites in literary works	p. 54
Opposition-creation in the poems of Mebdh McGuckian and Carol Ann Duffy	p. 55
Larkin's 'Talking in Bed' - questioning the world in poetry	p. 61
Novel openings	p. 67
Conclusion: The role(s) of unconventional opposites in literature	p. 76
The role of opposition-construction in discourse meanings	p. 78
Introduction - opposites in non-literary texts	p. 78
British General Election reporting	p. 78
Responses to 9/11	p. 87
The female body	p. 90
Those Danish cartoons	p. 94
Conclusion: the role(s) of unconventional opposition in non-literary texts	p. 107
The significance of opposition in language and texts	p. 109
A theory of opposites	p. 109
Mental representations and schemata: the cognitive basis of opposites	p. 113
Conceptual metaphors, mental spaces and text worlds	p. 122
Opposition-creation and ideology	p. 125
Opposition and universality	p. 131
Notes	p. 134
Bibliography	p. 137
Index	p. 141
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