The Language of Emotion: A Corpus-Based Cognitive-Stylistic Analysis of Grief and Loss in Namwali Serpell’s The Furrows and Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet

Abstract

Grief is an intensely subjective emotional experience whose abstract nature makes metaphor, embodiment, spatialization, and repetition central to its literary representation. This study investigates the linguistic and cognitive construction of grief and loss in Namwali Serpell’s The Furrows (2022) and Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020) through an integrated corpus-based cognitive-stylistic approach. Two purpose-built corpora were compiled from the narrative portions of the novels, containing 76,860 and 102,984 word tokens, respectively. Frequency profiling, normalized frequency comparison, collocation screening, and concordance-led close reading were combined with Conceptual Metaphor Theory and image-schema analysis. Potentially metaphorical expressions were identified contextually with reference to MIPVU principles. The findings reveal both shared and divergent cognitive models of bereavement. The Furrows gives greater lexical prominence to death, memory, absence, and the recurrent return of the lost person, while Hamnet foregrounds pain, crying, bodily experience, emptiness, and familial fragmentation. Both novels draw on FORCE, CONTAINER, PATH, PART-WHOLE, and presence-absence structures, yet their stylistic effects differ. Serpell constructs grief as recursive, unstable, and resistant to closure; O’Farrell presents grief as an embodied force that fractures individual and familial coherence before being reconfigured through memory and artistic representation. The study demonstrates that corpus evidence and cognitive-stylistic interpretation can complement each other by showing not merely that grief is a dominant theme but how recurrent linguistic choices organize different conceptual experiences of loss.