ABSTRACT
This chapter develops a procedure for identifying the verbal material that may most centrally contribute to the 'mental picturing' that postulate some readers tacitly use in the encapsulatory sense-making undertaken in the course of reading a short-story narrative. The procedure is essentially corpus linguistic, involving use of Wmatrix, a corpus-analysing software package to identify high frequency words and disproportionately frequent words in stories. The chapter explains a brief report on the mixed results obtained to support, by means of ordinary readers' chiefly questionnaire responses, this study's stylistic hypotheses about lexical prominence and HEI passages in short stories. The story creates a distinct kind of contract with the reader, whom it requires to attend personally not just as part of an audience to a complex of conditions, and to develop a detailed and inward understanding of the narrative situation.
