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“I was in that room!”: Conceptual integration of content and context in a writer’s vs. a prosecutor’s description of a murder

Cognitive Linguistics has shown time and again that fictivity and imagination play an important role in human language. In fact, counter to the folk belief, the work of cognitive linguists suggests that fictivity and imagination play as big a role in ordinary as in literary language. The basic claim is that metaphors (c.f. Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999; Lakoff and Turner 1989) or non-factual scenarios (c.f. Fauconnier 1994, 1997) for instance are not solely devices of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish. They reflect the way our minds work and their use is thus not restricted to literature. In this paper I assume this view in the comparison of the draft of a non-fiction book on a high-profile murder case with the prosecutor’s closing argument at the trial for the same murder. The focus of study is on two particularly dramatic fragments of the novelist’s book and the prosecutor’s argument. These deal with the killing of the victim. I have chosen the description of this particular event basically because no aspect related to the murder had been irrefutably proven. As I hope will become evident, as a result of the lack of conclusive tangible direct evidence in this case, both the writer’s description and that of the prosecutor set up conceptual configurations that were halfway between fact and fiction. More specifically, I discuss the description of the assumed criminal facts through