Textual Meaning

I have been a ‘stylistician’ for most of my career, and I wear that badge with pride. Often, however, the field of stylistics has been represented (and to some extent sidelined) as an application of (proper) linguistics to literary study. For me, stylistics doesn’t mean only considering the style of literature (though I work on poetry as often as I can) – it means investigating the style of any piece of language (text), spoken or written, private or public. This concern with what I have come to see as ‘textual meaning’ is adjacent to many other sub-disciplines of linguistics, perhaps most obviously discourse analysis and its critical sibling, CDA, though it also draws upon all the other sub-disciplines from phonology to pragmatics.

Having written many works concerned with the detailed operation of textual meaning, only intermittently and indirectly putting my toe in theoretical waters, I am now about to go full-on wild swimming by working on a theoretically-oriented monograph. The aim of this book will be to pull together all the strands of textual meaning I have been working on for so long into a coherent theory of textual meaning, located at the centre, rather than the periphery of linguistics, the discipline I fell in love with as an undergraduate.

The book, when it comes, will be called Textual Meaning and published by Cambridge University Press.