Literature as a Lens

As someone who works in a digital humanities lab, I found this week’s readings (particularly Atkins & Levin and Slobin) deeply interesting. By examining syntactic rules and when they’re broken, the formation and hierarchy of allomorphs, and the effect of typology on narrative style, the articles examined what literary analysis can reveal about language.

The Atkins and Levin article raises interesting questions about the implications of increasing access to digital corpora. The article explores seven verbs semantically similar to “shake” and examples of uses of the words that defy preconceived rules. Many of these examples are literary, like the phrase “quiver its quill” using an intransitive verb transitively. The article bring up the interesting note that “no corpus can ever offer negative evidence” (87). Rather, using huge bodies of digital text only make our preconceived notions of linguistics more complex. The role of literary writing in defying linguistic rules is exciting to me. Atkins and Levin cite examples like “quaked her bowels” and “tap and tremble inkwells” to show examples of intransitive verbs used transitively. Perhaps these examples exist because expressive, literary writing breaks linguistics rules to create more vivid, memorable text. The use of unconventional syntax to create literary prose is just one of the ways that access to an expansive, digital corpus changes the way we understand language.

Similarly, Slobin’s The Many Ways To Search For a Frog provides an interesting look into the way differences in structure of languages affects narrative style. Slobin shows that rhetorical style is determined by the accessibility of a means of expression based on whether a language is verb-framed or satellite-framed (233). The idea of an expressive phrase meaning something in different languages is fascinating; in S-languages, phrases like “owl popped out” occur being manner of motion verbs are readily accessible, while in V-languages, manner of motion verbs are less accessible (mostly used to describe a change of state). Slobin’s discussion of ideophones was also interesting- he gave examples of languages like Basque that use movement-imitatives, using words to express movement much like onomatopoeia in English expresses sounds (“doya-doya” in Basque means noisily) Combined with the information Haspelmath provided on lexemes and morphemes, the readings brought up the question of how the availability of word-forms in different languages affects style.

The idea of expression and narrative style taking form in different aspects of a sentence based on the language is interesting; does that mean an English writer will be more attuned to the way a movement is being executed than a Turkish writer, or that a Basque writer will have better intuition for what a movement sounds like than a Mandarin writer? Slobin’s article reminds me of the idea of linguistic relativity; that idea that, on a cognitive level, the language you speak affects the way you think. Does the availability of certain stylistic elements affect what speakers of different languages consider to be stylistic? Does the structure of a language affect how people see the world, what they consider to be expressive or descriptive?