ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH MODERNIST ... - DRUM

narratives. This fundamental difference is similar to the difference in Langacker’s
work between a noun and a verb.
For Langacker, the classes of noun and verb each “combine a cognitively
salient prototype with a highly abstract schema reflecting a basic cognitive ability”
(Langacker 9). Each basic word-class allows us to put a basic cognitive ability into
words and in turn allows words to invoke a basic cognitive ability. For nouns, this
ability is “conceptual reification, our manifest capacity for grouping a set of entities
and manipulating them as a unitary entity for higher-order purposes. […] At the most
schematic level, a noun is thus characterized as an expression that profiles a thing”
(Langacker 10). Nouns give thing-ness to our thoughts. Verbs are somewhat more
complex, drawing on two basic cognitive abilities: “the ability to establish
relationships, and to scan sequentially through a complex structure. It is claimed that
every verb profiles a process, defined as a relationship that evolves through time and
is scanned sequentially along this axis. A process might also be called a temporal
relation, where ‘temporal’ refers to both its evolution through time and the sequential
nature of its scanning” (Langacker 10). The double-temporality in verbs is analogous
to the double-temporality of The Unfortunates: this novel, like many modernist
works, is concerned not only with the temporal relations of the primary narrative
(how the narrator related to Tony through time), but with the temporal relations of the
focalizer and reader to that primary narrative (how the narrator remembers his
relationship with Tony; how the reader learns about the narrator’s relationship with
Tony as well as his process of remembering). It is not only the case that Tony and the
narrator have had a temporal relationship to each other, but that conceptual access to
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