Rendering, generalization and variation

Abstract

The article presents a case study of how the use of multiple parallel texts may be employed as a useful research method in cognitive poetics, using the English version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and its four published Czech versions as the samples. In the analysis, we examine the language of space in alternative verbalizations of the same literary scene across languages (English and Czech) and within the target language (Czech), and the different mental images invoked by the different ways of verbalizing the same scene. Our analysis shows that the use of multiple parallel texts can be a helpful research method in cognitive poetics, in the sense that the method is capable of providing naturalistic and representative linguistic evidence of how languages systematically differ, even for a domain as basic as space.