الفهرس 
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Abstract
Horror fiction is a genre that has the illocutionary force of tantalizing and horrifying its readers. This dissertation explores the linguistic realization of horror, its causes and repercussions with the aim of eliciting its peculiarities and the workings of its linguistic structures in the mind. The study uses an eclectic set of analytical tools within a cognitive stylistic framework, drawing mainly on Langacker (2008)’s cognitive grammar, as well as conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) and conceptual blending theory (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002), which are developed within the framework of cognitive semantics. This study attempts to answer the following questions: 1. How can the genre of horror be described in terms of its unifying linguistic features? 2. How does horror genre’s disruption of reality result in a linguistic disruption? 3. How far are the thematic characteristics of horror achieved linguistically? 4. In what way is human vulnerability in the face of horror linguistically manifested? To this end, the study investigates three seminal American horror novels written in the 1970s, the peak of horror as a genre: William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971), Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) and Jay Anson’s The Amityville Horror (1977). The findings of the study reveal that the genre of horror can be described in terms of its unifying linguistic peculiarities, taking into consideration the stylistic idiosyncrasies of each writer. On the semantic level, the results demonstrate how horror authors draw on the cognitive faculty of attention through skillfully employing the construal operation of selection to cause a semantic conflict and heighten the sense of uncertainty in the readers. Furthermore, the cognitive faculties of judgment and comparison are well exploited in using metaphors to aid in such semantic conflict in addition to creating a horrific atmosphere through a sinister account of pathetic fallacy. On the grammatical level, the study argues that the dynamics of energy transmission in horror underscores the cognitive linguistic notion that meaning is embodied, whereby the disturbance caused by the supernatural in the schematic knowledge of humans about the world is conceived primarily through humans’ cognitive faculties. This further highlights the vulnerability of humans in the face of evil, primarily portrayed as losing control over their actions. Finally, on the sentential level, the study illustrates how horror authors manipulate syntactic structure and use mixed modes of mental scanning to intensify the readerly experience of horror.