| Keywords [eng] |
Mind style, Asperger’s Syndrome, Theory of Mind, pragmatic failure, "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time", "House Rules", "Marcelo in the New World", sąmonės būklę atspindintis stilių, Aspergerio sindromas, proto suvokimo teorija, pragmatinė nesėkmė |
| Abstract [eng] |
The subject of the Thesis is mind style of the main characters who have Asperger’s Syndrome in the three novels: Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2004), Francisco X. Stork’s Marcelo in the Real World (2009), and Jodi Picoult’s House Rules (2010). The aim of the Thesis is to identify and compare the stylistic devices, and linguistic strategies employed by the three aforementioned authors to portray characters with cognitive idiosyncrasies. By examining the cognitive processes, information processing mechanisms, and characteristic of autistic characters, this research endeavours to distinguish the nuanced variations in mind style among autistic characters. Moreover, this study seeks to explore how much mind style variations impact on various aspects of autistic characters’ lives, including social interaction, communication, learning, and daily tasks and commitments. In order to achieve this aim, the following objectives have been set: to review the scientific literature related to mind style, the medical knowledge on ASD and the existing literary criticism of the selected novels; to identify, classify and analyse the most prominent stylistic features of mind styles in the novels; to interpret and compare the identified features of mind style in the selected novels, drawing conclusions about the differences and similarities among them and the way they contribute to the overall aesthetics and interpretation of the novels themselves. The structure of the thesis includes: list of acronyms and abbreviations, acknowlegments, an abstract, an introduction, neuro(a)typical mind styles, theoretical and conceptual framework, analysis of mind styles in the selected novels, conclusions, primary sources, list of references, summary, and appendices. It was determined that previously all three novels were not analyzed and compared together, thus their mind styles were not explored to the fullest potential. To analyse Christopher’s mind style, qualitative and quantitative methods were applied. The Thesis cognitive and pragmatic language processing characteristics of AS individuals provided by Vogindroukas et al. 2022): 1. Inappropriate Language Behaviour 2. Literal Interpretation 3. Domain-specific vocabulary 4. Monotone or Atypical Prosody 5. Difficulty with Social Pragmatics 6. Echolalia Pragmatic failure such as literal interpretation and echolalia were distinguished for further analysis and comparison between the novels. Following among of exctracts with individual mind styles were collected: Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in The Night-Time: 29 extracts, total length 2,505 words. Francisco X. Stork's Marcelo in the Real World: 56 extracts, total length 2,246 words. Jodi Picoult's House Rules: 36 extracts, total length 1,821 words. It was determined that the collected samples of literal interpretations fall to a various degree into earlier mentioned subcategories introduced by Suryandari and Sutrisno (2018): sarcasm, idioms, common phrases, metaphors, hyperbole, jokes, pedantic speech, words with multiple meanings, violation of conversational maxims: maxim of quality, maxim of quantity, maxim of relation, maxim of manner (Grice 1975), indirect speech acts. Meanwhile echolalia got divided into two categories: repetition of phrases or sentences, and repetition of words or phrases heard from movies, books, or TV shows). After analysing and comprating the three idiosyncratic mind styles it was determined that although their mind styles have some similarities like common difficulty with figurative speech, The portrayal of AS characters in the chosen novels will vary in terms of mind style depiction, linguistic patterns and narrative representation. |
