ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of ideas about intentionality and the role of the writer in creating meanings. Different readers may have different implied authors in mind based on their own knowledge and experiences. The chapter examines ways in which cognitive approaches to literary study have examined how readers often construct a mental model of the author as they read. Researchers working in cognitive linguistics and cognitive narratology have drawn on findings from psychology to re-examine how readers conceptualise and work with the notion of intentionality. Like David Herman’s ideas, P. Stockwell’s concept of ‘mind-modelling’ is based on inferencing and treats literary reading as a communicative act in which readers impute intentionality behind linguistic choices onto writers. Using the name of an author as shorthand for their work can be explained through the cognitive linguistic notions of domain, metonymy and profiling.
