Published 2025-11-18
Keywords
- Cheating at Canasta,
- Point of View,
- Pragmatics,
- Stylistics,
- William Trevor
Copyright (c) 2025 Ilaria Rizzato
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
This article looks at the linguistic construction of point of view in William Trevor’s 2007 collection of short stories Cheating at Canasta. The analysis uses the methodology of stylistics and pragmatics to identify meaning-making strategies and the goals they pursue in constructing point of view. Particularly, the “modal grammar of point of view” devised by Paul Simpson in Language, Ideology and Point of View (1993) provides a model for connecting different text typologies based on narratorial positioning and modality with different representations of perspective in text and for identifying the linguistic strategies at work in Trevor’s short stories to construct character’s psychology.