Explore the vast range of titles available.

In this article, I investigate the ontological status of the minor working-class character Mrs. McNab, the cleaner in “Time Passes\", the middle section of Virginia Woolf’s tripartite novel To the Lighthouse. Woolf regarded this section as the connecting block between the two outer blocks, “The Window” and “The Lighthouse”, in which she aimed to depict an empty house, devoid of human presence, and to highlight the passage of time. This section has often been analysed by literary-stylistic criticism as if written from a non-anthropocentric worldview. However, the presence of a lower-class cleaner and the absence of the upper middle-class characters who predominate in the other two blocks has also raised much debate in the literary arena. Literary critics agree that this character is given a narrative voice, but how this voice functions, and whether this character is granted narrative agency in terms of the class issues and social relations in the period of transition between Victorian England and the early twentieth-century, is an issue which still remains open. Drawing upon cognitive stylistics, I suggest reading this character both as a category-based and person-based character, and as a narrative device. First, I carry out the analysis of the repetitive she-clusters and their semantic prosodies; then, through samples of the section “Time Passes\", I analyse how viewpoint blending between narrator/author and character concur to grant narrative agency to Mrs. McNab and to what extent such agency may be limited by our perception of her through the social schemata of a servant, or whether such a perception may undergo a process of schema refreshment. Last, I suggest that this character may also be viewed as a narrative agent by means of which the reader can activate mental processes of TIME and SPACE blending between the three different blocks of the novel. This blending process allows for the completion of the narrative design of the novel: the journey to the lighthouse.

Greek relative clauses introduced by 'pu' have been described as structurally determined constructions in which interpretation is precisely guided by the syntax of the clause. In contrast to this oversimplified view, I show that 'pu' relatives regularly underspecify the intended interpretation, incorporating instead a great deal of indeterminacy (in the sense of Langacker) in the way(s) the meaning of the head is integrated with the content of the relative clause. The factors which influence the construction of meaning include the lexical (in frame semantic terms) & constructional properties of the head & the relative clause predicate, but extend further to completely pragmatic & context-specific motivations; in the latter case, the head & the overt constituents in the relative clause function simply as clues for the final interpretation. The inherent indeterminacy of the relative construction can be captured in terms of conceptual integration theory, where the blended space may be shown to contain more structure than that in the input spaces &/or the alternate construals of a sentence may yield more than one blend. Finally I suggest that, while indeterminate, the interpretation of 'pu' relatives is sensitive to constraints deriving from the prototypical meaning of restrictive relatives & from conceptual structure as such. Figures, References. Adapted from source document