Staff profiles
Dr Barbara MacMahon
BA, PhD
Phone 0114 225 3789
E-mail b.macmahon@shu.ac.uk
Research interests/current work
I am currently completing a monograph on the interpretation of sound patterning in poetry.
My research interests lie mainly in the area of literary linguistics and literary pragmatics. In particular I am interested in the possibilities for explaining literary communication afforded by relevance theory, a cognitive pragmatic model of general communication. I work specifically on developing the relevance theory notions of weak implicature, poetic effects and interpretive use in relation to literary texts.
I am also interested in psycholinguistics, especially in spreading activation models of lexical access and retrieval, and in the relation between the decoding process these models describe and the inferential interpretive process of the relevance theory model.
Research outputs since 2001
Articles
2008 (forthcoming) Metarepresentation and decoupling in Northanger Abbey.
2007 The effects of sound patterning in poetry: a cognitive pragmatic approach. Journal of Literary Semantics 36, 103-120
2006 Stylistics: pragmatic approaches, in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd edition) Amsterdam: Elsevier
2006 Relevance theory: stylistic approaches, in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd edition) Amsterdam: Elsevier
2004 Review of Fabb, N. (2002) Language and Literary Structure. Language and Literature 13:2, 186-188
2001 The effects of word substitution in slips of the tongue, Finnegans Wake and The Third Policeman. English Studies 82:3, 231-246
2001 Relevance Theory and the use of voice in poetry. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 15, 11-34
