Whence the Unicorn? A Frame-Semantic and Corpus Linguistic Interpretation of the Notion of Unicornhood in the Characterology of Iris Murdoch’s Novel: The Unicorn

Abstract

The notion of unicornhood in the characterology of Iris Murdoch’s Gothic fiction titled The Unicorn has been interpreted variously by literary critics since the publication of the novel.The present paper provides a linguistically and cultural philosophically grounded, frame-semantic analysis, interpretation as well as evidence of the concept of unicornhood, wherein behavioral and appearance-related socio-cultural stereotypes mentally stored in encyclopedically-based knowledge structures about the factually non-existent, imaginary (or, perhaps, existent) being are identified and discussed. The semantically and lexical-pragmatically based factors revealed in the analysis are supported by an empirical investigation of corpus-based evidence gained from the British National Corpus of 100 million words, by studying the dictionary-based representation of the lexical item unicorn, and also by testing the tacitly represented background knowledge of 40 native speakers of English, with the aim to provide a joint control over the corpus-based data. As a result, it is pointed out that the standard characterology offered by literary scholars requires further re-evaluation and reinterpretatrion, expectably revealing the multiple realization of unicornhood symbolism represented in the novel.

Keywords

• stereotypes
• background knowledge
• conceptual representation
• corpus-based evidence
• Iris Murdoch: The Unicorn
• nonexistent object