This paper will show why in the German language, such complicated structures as the verbal brace is so prevalent despite obviously presenting a cognitive challenge for foreign language learners. The verbal brace should therefore be studied both from the diachronic and from the contrastive perspectives to show whether it is exclusively a German structure or whether this development has appeared in other Germanic languages too. It is also interesting to consider what it is about the special performance of this structure which has contributed to its success.
Based on an analysis of two Prefaces to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. A Gothic Story, the paper offers a cognitive poetics view of paratext, a literary device defined by Genette as “a threshold of interpretation”. Viewed as a symptom of the author’s presence “with-in” and “with-out” text, paratextual information is held to play an important role in text interpretation. It is claimed that a literary work’s interpretation is a result of the speaker/author – hearer/reader meaning negotiation which takes place in the Current Discourse Space (Langacker 2008) and involves intersubjectification, a cognitive process referred to by Langacker as “apprehension of other minds” (Langacker 2007).
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