Priming text function in personification allegory: A corpus-assisted approach

Abstract

Current linguistic examination of allegory focuses on its cognitive structure as conceptual metaphor, with its linguistic form realised in the absence of a target domain (Crisp, 2001; 2008). The present study addresses the intersection of conceptualisation and form in examining how personification allegory functions within a literary context as either fictional world or thematic elements. Central to this is the idea of lexical priming, which suggests that readers are both textually and experientially primed to interpret personified referents allegorically or non-allegorically depending on their contextual use. In this article I draw on Mahlberg and McIntyre’s (2011) framework for literary text function to take an integrated cognitive-corpus approach to exploring allegorical function through the lens of lexical priming, with corpus analysis revealing the patterns on which these cognitive primings are textually based. To this end, real-world examples of personification allegory are drawn from the Middle English allegorical poem Piers Plowman relative to a corpus of other late medieval poetic literature. My main findings suggest that the textual functionality attributed to allegorical referents is neither mutually exclusive nor directly correlative to a particular textual pattern, but rather contingent on the degree of animacy-based priming evidenced in their core semantic meaning or textual foregrounding. These results additionally indicate that function-based primings depend on the type of allegory appearing in the text (i.e. property versus class allegory).