As we saw in 2.4.2, Semino uses the general notion ‘world view’ to refer to the overall view of reality conveyed by the language of a text. Then, she distinguishes between two aspects of world view: ideological point of view and mind style, claiming that it is ‘possible and useful to distinguish those aspects of world-views that are shared and culture-dependent from those that are personal and dependent on individual experience and cognition’ (Semino 2002: 97). Semino s distinction has also its counterpart in van Dijk’s theory. The aspects of world views that are shared
and culture-dependent can be related to van Dijk’s ideologies and attitude schemata whereas the aspects of world-views that are personal correspond to van Dijk’s opinions.
In the previous section we saw that, for van Dijk, an ideology consists of a cluster of socially relevant attitudes’ through which people ‘position’ themselves within social structure. Ideologies are not individual but group based, and are about gender, class, race, politics, religion, etc. Similarly, for Semino, ideological point of view refers to ‘those aspects of world views that are social, cultural, religious, or political in origin, and which an individual is likely to share with others belonging to similar social, cultural, religious or political groups’ (Semino 2002: 97). The analytical difference in the work of these two authors is that van Dijk applies the notion of ideology to analyse newspaper articles, congress speeches and, more generally, prejudiced speech, whereas Semino applies the notion of ideological point of view to the analysis of literary fictional characters.
Semino’s explanation of mind style (2002: 97) refers to aspects of world views that are personal, including ‘an individual’s characteristic cognitive habits, abilities and limitations, and any beliefs and values that may arise from them’ (my emphasis). These values are strictly personal, that is, they are particular opinions, since if they were socially shared, Semino would classify them within ideological point of view.
Semino illustrates her two concepts with an example from The Collector.
In discussing Fowles’s The Collector, for example, I will point out that Clegg’s world view includes a moralistic condemnation o f sex and a tendency to view women as butterflies. I will argue that the two are related, but that the former is part of his ideological point o f view, while the latter is part o f his mind style. (Semino 2002: 97)
Reconsidering Semino’s example taking into account van Dijk s terminology, Clegg shares with other members of his family his Nonconformist religion, that is to say, his
Nonconformist ideology. This ideology includes a series of attitude schemata towards certain objects and episodes, featuring, for example, a condemnation of sex. Clegg’s negative attitude schema towards sex applies in context models through the instantiation of his general opinion about sex. On the other hand, when Clegg in a given context model views a woman as a butterfly, as Semino suggests, that is his particular opinion about that woman expressed through a metaphor. His particular opinion is generalised as far as he usually perceives women as butterflies, though his opinion is not socially shared but individual.
While the theoretical notions of ideological point of view and ideology, as defined by van Dijk, match completely, the notions of mind style and particular opinions differ to some extent. There exist two main differences. First, van Dijk’s particular opinions make reference to all opinions in context models that are not socially shared. On the other hand, the analysis of a character’s mind style involves how language reflects a character’s opinions as well as other cognitive processing habits not related to opinions (e.g. cognitive impairments). And second, mind style makes reference to foregrounded particular opinions that reveal idiosyncratic world views or some cognitive characteristics (i.e. drunkenness, young children stage of development) of characters. Thus, only when character’s particular opinions are revealing about their idiosyncratic world views, they will be analysed under mind style. Semino and Swindlehurst recognise that ‘although in theory mind style applies to all texts, in practice its relevance is limited to cases where a text s view of reality is perceived by the reader to suggest a particularly striking, idiosyncratic, or deviant understanding of the world.’ (1996: 145). Despite these two differences, I consider that the two notions are similar enough to be treated as analogous for my analytical purposes.
Moreover, the discourse structures reflecting opinions and mind style coincide. Researchers have exemplified mind style using the linguistic phenomena (see 2.4.2) which van Dijk also uses in his analysis of opinions, both socially shared and particular opinions. Lexicalisation, value-laden expressions, syntactic structures, transitivity patterns, morphology, deixis and metaphor are some of the linguistic characteristics of texts that have been shown to reflect mind style that van Dijk also lists as expressing opinions (see previous section).
In conclusion, the notions of ideological point of view and ideology and mind style and particular opinions have been shown to refer to the same phenomena from different theoretical backgrounds. However, the expression of all particular opinions cannot be considered mind style because, as Semino and Swindlehurst state, only deviant understandings of the world make mind style a relevant feature of a literary text. In the following sections, I will claim that in the same way that mind style is the realization of particular opinions by means of unusual, deviant linguistic choices, ideological point of view can also be reflected in peculiar pragmatic phenomena.