It is a truism that the worlds constructed in literature must be constructed through language. It is therefore worth the effort to discover the means by which authors use language to construct those worlds. This paper examines the language of two authors noted for constructing radically different worlds: Henry James and Ernest Hemingway. Henry James is noted for his complicated style and for his interest in the characters' perceptions of the world around them. Further, the world his characters inhabit is not a simple world, but rather is complex and the characters' perceptions of that world are complicated. Hemingway, on the other hand has the reputation of presenting the world his characters inhabit as clear and obvious. Further, he has the reputation of focusing on the actions (rather than the perceptions) of the characters.

One question which will be addressed in this paper is how these two presentations are achieved linguistically. A comparison of sections of the Ambassadors by James and Farewell to Arms by Hemingway shows that while James uses a few more mental processes than does Hemingway, James uses grammatical metaphor far more than does Hemingway, and much of this grammatical metaphor involves grammatical metaphor for mental processes. Not only does James express more mental concepts than Hemingway, he refers to a greater variety of mental processes, including processes of affection, and cognition as well as perception.

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