The Grammar of Immersion. A Cognitive Grammar Analysis of immersive Narrative

Abstract

In her influential book on narrative immersion (2015 [2001]), Marie-Laure Ryan discusses a number of narrative strategies facilitating immersion. Apart from the present tense and direct or free indirect speech, these narrative strategies are all of a narratological rather than linguistic nature. Building further on Ryan’s work, this article explores the linguistic features of immersive narrative. Central to my analysis is the Cognitive Grammar concept of ‘construal’, the language user’s capacity to conceive and portray the same situation in alternate ways. In close readings of two famous literary battle scenes – from the Iliad and from Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme – I demonstrate that construal can serve as a highly useful tool in stylistic and narratological analysis as it is closely linked to specific linguistic phenomena, such as tense and aspect, negation, deixis, speech representation, spatial and temporal markers, perspective, intonation units qua attentional frames, and vocabulary.