A cognitive stylistic analysis of Simon's lyric "The Sound of Silence"

Abstract EN

Various methods have been used to discover the sublime mysteries of literary texts.

Cognitive stylistics is one of the rich and most useful approaches that focuses on the process of reading to infer meaning.

Though meaning is located in the formal structure of the literary text, readers can also approach meaning by deploying aspects of their previous background knowledge (schema).

This paper is a cognitive stylistic analysis of Simon's lyric “The Sound of Silence”.

It attempts to explore the patterns of creativity and novelty in language use.

It is more concerned with investigating how figures of speech can be employed as features of creativity and novelty in “The Sound of Silence”.

The analysis traces Simon‟s use of different types of figures of speech and shows how such a use leads to produce new metaphorical mappings and novel image schemata.

The analysis also reveals how the coherence among figures of speech, and the use of extended and complex figurative expressions, lead to creating new stylistic frameworks and metaphorical formulas that illustrate the idea of novelty and creativity in this lyric