Clipped wings and the great abyss: Cognitive stylistics and implicatures in Abiezer Coppe’s ‘prophetic’ recantation

摘要

In this article, two major paradigms within cognitive stylistics, the Conceptual Metaphor Theory(CMT) and the Conceptual Integration Theory (CIT), are applied as largely complementaryapproaches to discuss the scope and implicatures of the central metaphorical image of Copp’s Returnto the wayes of Truth (1651), a text written by one of the most famous radical preachers of the CivilWar period as a plea to be released from prison. The article will focus on how the linguistic and culturalcontexts of Coppe’s prophetic writing, in their interaction with the dynamic conceptual relationshipsof a conceptual integration network, open up new possibilities of perspectivizing and insinuatingradically different meanings and implicatures: the use of blends in Coppe’s text has a direct effect onthe structure of the analogies that can be made between mental spaces, thereby triggering new meaningeffects, supplementary symbolizing patterns, and unpredictable perlocutionary effects.