Synopses of Margaret Freeman's articles

"Grounded spaces: deictic -self anaphors in the poetry of Emily Dickinson", Language and Literature, 1997

Synopsis: Ungrammaticality in poetry, when it is considered 'acceptable' by literary critics, has been characteristically dismissed as 'poetic license'. Traditional grammar has no explanation for the occurrence of forms such as Emily Dickinson's -self anaphor pronouns. Under a cognitive linguistics account, however, her apparently ungrammatical -self anaphors are perfectly grammatical. Dickinson's -self anaphors, grounded in mental spaces, are triggered by the subject/agent of their originating space. Dickinson's use of the -self anaphor in projected mental spaces makes the self deictically present in that space: not any self, but the self as agent in the originating space. By using the principle of -self anaphor projection from the subject/agent in one mental space into another, Dickinson creates for us a world of possibilities: a world in which things can happen and be made to happen through the agencies of the self.

"Metaphor making meaning: Dickinson's conceptual universe", Journal of Pragmatics, 1995

Synopsis: If meaning, understanding, and reasoning in human language are achieved through bodily experience and figurative processes, then the traditional notion of a separation in kind between ordinary discourse and poetic language no longer holds. Metaphor making is not peripheral but central to our reasoning, not unique to poetical thinking but that which is shared by both ordinary discourse and the language of poetry. Poets, then, in their metaphor making, serve as arbiters and commentators on the way humans understand and interpret their world. Much of Dickinson's poetry is structured by the extent to which she rejected the dominant metaphor of her religious environment, that of LIFE IS A JOURNEY THROUGH TIME, and replaced it with a metaphor more in accordance with the latest scientific discoveries of her day, that of LIFE IS A VOYAGE IN SPACE. Examples from her poems show how the schemas of PATH and CYCLE and the AIR IS SEA metaphor contribute to a coherent and consistent patterning that at the same time reflects a physically embodied world and creates Dickinson's conceptual universe.