Text World Theory is a powerful framework for discourse analysis that, thus far, has only been used in monolingual Anglophone stylistic analyses. This work adapts Text World Theory for the analysis of Spanish discourse, and in doing so suggests some improvements to the way in which it deals with discourse - in particular, with direct speech and conditional expressions. Furthermore, it applies Text World Theory in a novel way, searching not for style in language, but for the style of a language. Focusing principally on deixis and modality, the author examines whether Spanish speakers and English speakers construct the narrative text-world in any patterned ways. To do so, the 'frog story' methodology is employed, eliciting spoken narratives from native adult speakers of both languages by means of a children's picture book. These narratives are transcribed and subjected to a qualitative text-world analysis, which is supported with a quantitative corpus analysis. The results reveal contrasts in Spanish and English speakers' use of modality and deixis in building the same narrative text-world, and are relevant to scholars working in language typology, cross-cultural pragmatics and translation studies. These novel applications of the Text World Theory push the boundaries of stylistics in new directions, broadening the focus from monolingual texts to languages at large.

This textbook introduces the reader to contemporary approaches to language analysis such as cognitive stylistics and corpus stylistics, reflecting recent shifts in research trends and offering students a practical way to access and understand these developments. The authors lead readers through detailed explanations, guided analyses, examples of research and suggestions for further reading. This textbook makes an ideal introduction to the field of stylistics for students who are new to the area, but who have some background in basic language analysis. It will be of use to students on courses in stylistics, literary linguistics, corpus methods, cognitive linguistics, and language and style.