The explanation that Leech does opt for is that

this [third] paragraph captures the stage of concept formation in Pip's childish development, when cheap necklaces conceptualizes these familiar melancholy experiences; grasping them as categories of meaning. He has heard his foster-parents and his community talk before of 'the churchyard,' 'the river,' and 'the marshes,' but now he learns how to link his own vivid sensory and emotive experiences to these categories. Last but not least in the list, he becomes conscious of his own identity against the background of his environment. (124)

Leech then involves "this new level of explanation, concerned with the cognitive development of Pip" with "two recurrent themes of prose sty listics: viewpoint and mind style" (124-25). Such a move is quite in keeping with the kind of 'close-tothe-text' stylistics that Leech's paper seeks to re-visit; even at its-most formal and analytic, sty listics-as-was was always concerned to investigate and justify the text's "potential for interpretation" - its capacity for prompting and licensing connections going beyond words and syntax towards a grasp of multivariate connections of understanding and conceptualization surrounding (and indeed demanded by) these self-same words and syntax.

For Leech, complexities of viewpoint are prominent: "There are three people's viewpoints to bear cheap pendants mind . . . which blend together in an overall experience of the fiction" (125). These "three people" (perhaps better understood - in terms Leech introduces just a page later (126) - as a "threefold conceptual network") are (bold original):

(a). . . the reader, who knows nothing about Pip and his environment at the beginning of the novel. ..(b)... the "I-person" narrator, adult Pip. remembering and recounting his early life ... in adult language far beyond the range of young Pip ... (c) ... the focalizer, young Pip, experiencing the terrors and discoveries of childhood, and whose intense learning experiences we are invited to share ... ( 1 25)

With the subsequent presentation of further argument, all bearing on his interpretative case, and having to do with deixis, mental spaces, and the textual presentation of speech, writing and thought, Leech moves to a summative conclusion:

Triggered by foregrounded features in the reading process, the reader's mind constructs a conceptual integration cheap rings incorporating the three chief mental spaces associated with reader, narrator (adult Pip), and focalizer (young Pip). The blending process is complex, and what comes out of it is a multi-faceted emergent structure . . .: a reader's cognition of an interrelation between the three viewpoints of reader, narrator and focalizer, . . . (130)