Directions in Empirical Literary Studies: In Honor of Willie Van Peer (Linguistic Approaches to Literature)

Why gap.

He made it. Fucking bastard!

(Source: The British National Corpus)

Malinowski’s (1935) routine associations of gardening or fishing could not fail to become more profound symbolically if they were ever to be set within the boundaries of a poem. The very simplicity of their primitivism, in Fortunati’s (forthcoming) sense, relexicalizes them and breathes life into their symbolism. At the beginning of St. Mark’s Gospel we witness the irony, akin that of the Sartor Resartus, of fishers being fished by the Son of Man – snared within the toils of a faith whose moment, John the Baptist declared, had arrived. It is in these expressions that the collocates of fishing as a Wittgensteinian (1922) Sachverhalt or ‘state of affairs’ are suddenly altered and propelled into a new symbolism by means of a hitherto unknown collocate as a ‘fish-surrogate’: man himself is fished and the disciples are to become ‘fishers of men’. Is this device more profound than the apparent paronomasia of Philip Larkin (1988) in his description of home in the poem of the same name? A glorious shot at how things ought to be Long fallen wide …

What looks like a washed out Lakoffian-Johnsonian (1980; 2003) ‘metaphor we live by’ at the beginning of the sentence is imbued, by the time we reach its end, with the dark blue of new blue jeans, as though they had never known the routine washdays of married life and of home. It is relexicalized: the conflicts of marriage are terrifyingly more real than the mere delexical attempt involved in ‘having a shot at’ something. Having a shot at marriage involves real priming and dry powder. 3.  Collocation and critical methodology The term method is derived from the Greek meta (after) + hodos (path). Its etymology is suggestive of change: method is the ‘after-path’ that follows momentous change of a type that frequently involves a paradigm-shift. The remainder of this paper will examine the way in which methodology in stylistics is likely to alter as a result of the digital turn away from its analogue past. The terms digital turn and empirical need to be examined both separately and in relation to one another. The terms digital and analogue are derived by extension from the way in which they are used in science to refer to technological advances in computers. A computer that operates on data in the form of digits, rather than

 Bill Louw

the physical quantities used in analogue computers (employing cogs, gears and levers), is essential for dealing with the task of stylistics as a form of data-assisted reading. The reason for this is that a corpus acts as a sample of the whole of the language of the target text. Any particular instance of language from a literary text under examination and for discussion needs to be supported by the empirical power of a digital computer to produce more contexts for that linguistic feature from the whole language than mere intuition or introspection might afford. Digital computers are capable of dealing automatically with a very wide range of problems at very high speeds. This takes us to the way in which the term empirical has altered within critical theory in order to warrant the use of the expression digital turn. For example, Belsey (1980: 7) states that common sense in literary criticism proposes a form of humanism based on an empiricist-idealist interpretation of the world. Her use of the term empiricist implies no more than reliance upon experience. Philosophers have always used the term in this way. However, for the scientist, the term always refers to the results of experiment and observation only. It is towards this meaning and with the objectives of this timely commemorative volume in mind that the digital turn is being made. This paradigm-shift is already underway. Once completed, it is likely to bring an entirely new order into the methodology of literary stylistics and criticism. This new order is likely to alter the procedural steps of traditional literary criticism and stylistics. Note how the approach of Firth and Malinowski differs from those of Abrams and Jakobson in Table 1. Instead of beginning with speech or writing as phonic or graphic data, they begin with the text embedded in its context of culture and situation (Malinowski stated that translation becomes impossible unless this is done). The approach of Abrams owes more to psychologism, but the approach of Firth and Malinowski is to be preferred because of their commitment to banishing concepts and the ‘ideas’ meaning of words. Collocation ‘pictures’ these contexts of culture and situation in Wittgenstein’s (1922) sense and as part of his Picture Theory of Meaning which the Tractatus sets out in detail. Table 1.  Typical approximate approaches to stylistics and criticism Direction of process is downward in each column Jakobson (1960)

Firth & Malinowski (1935)

Abrams (1957; 1970)

phonetic phonological morphological grammatical syntactic semantic discoursal

context of culture context of situation stylistics collocation lexicography grammar and syntax phonaesthetics

thought-form rise and fall of emotions figures of speech imagery diction sound



Chapter 16.  Consolidating empirical method in data-assisted stylistics 

The breakthrough in the area of digital collocation that was to facilitate the alteration of the methodology set out above has come about fairly gradually. Attempts were made to utilize digital collocation in literary stylistics as early as a paper by Louw (1989) delivered in 1987: the year in which the first edition of the Cobuild English Language Dictionary was produced by John Sinclair. However, the approach could not be consolidated until technological advances had taken place. For example, in 1987 the corpus amounted to a mere 21 million words of running text and computers were incapable of carrying out procedures such as coselection and the creation of N-grams. The Bank of English is currently operating at a total of half a billion words of running text. Both of the procedures mentioned are crucial to the computational construction of literary worlds. This is especially advantageous for second language learners. The ‘states of affairs’ inherent in literary devices will be fictional and hence modified versions of everyday events. Second language learners practicing corpus stylistics will need only two collocates in order to retrieve a particular state of affairs from the corpus using co-selection. As the state of affairs emerges from the corpus, it will carry with it all of its other collocates. The practitioner will then be in a position to determine exactly which collocates are present and which collocates have been omitted by the literary author. These insights are crucial to both language learning and to literary appreciation. The much-vaunted integration of language and literature has finally come of age. Advances of this theoretical approach in the digital domain continue to be made in spite of censorship, particularly of (1) any reference to the role of Michael Halliday (in Bazell 1966: 156) in reining back Firthian collocation into syntax; (2) the role of semantic prosody in the falsification of linguistic theories (Louw 2007a), and (3) the connection between collocation as instrumentation for language, philosophy and science (Louw 2003). The most serious censorship was carried out by Michael Hoey upon two of this author’s chapters that were to have appeared in the much delayed Approaches to Corpus Stylistics, a volume that was to have been published by Routledge. His apparent motive was to replace scientifically respectable semantic prosody with his own almost entirely intuitive notion of priming. Whitsitt (2005) appears to have had a similar motive. His entirely non-computational paper inexplicably appeared in flagrant contravention of the published criteria for the acceptance of corpus-based research by the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics. However, it was John Sinclair himself who brought about the realization that the context of culture and the context of situation are now accessible within corpora of natural language by empirical means and in fulfillment of Firth’s vision for linguistic and stylistic fieldwork. Sinclair’s pamphlet entitled Phrasebite is set out in full below.

 Bill Louw

“When she was – Phrasebite© John Sinclair, 2006. 1. The first grammatical collocate of when is she 2. The first grammatical collocate of when she is was

3. The vocabulary collocates of when she was are hair-raising. On the first page: diagnosed, pregnant, divorced, raped, assaulted, attacked The diagnoses are not good, the pregnancies are all problematic. 4. Select one that looks neutral: approached 5. Look at the concordance, first page. 6. Nos 1, 4, 5, 8,10 are of unpleasant physical attacks 7. Nos 2, 3, 6, 7, 9 are of excellent opportunities 8. How can you tell the difference? 9. the nasties are all of people out and about, while the nice ones are of people working somewhere. 10. Get wider cotext and look at verb tenses in front of citation. 11. In all the nasties the verb is past progressive, setting a foreground for the approach. 12. In the nice ones, the verb is non-progressive, either simple past or past-in-past. Data for para 4 above. (1) walking in Burnfield Road, Mansewood, when she was approached by a man who grabbed her bag (2) teamed up with her mother in business when she was approached by Neiman Marcus, the department store (3) resolved itself after a few months, when she was approached by Breege Keenan, a nun who (4) Bridge Road close to the Causeway Hospital when she was approached by three men who attacked her (5) Drive, off Saughton Mains Street, when she was approached by a man. He began talking the original (6) film of The Stepford Wives when she was approached by producer Scott Rudin to star as (7) bony. Kidd was just 15 when she was approached to be a model. Posing on (8) near her home with an 11–year-old friend when she was approached by the fiend. The man (9) finished a storming set of jazz standards when she was approached by SIR SEAN CONNERY. And she (10) on Douglas Street in Cork city centre when she was approached by the pervert. The man persuaded  (from: Phrasebite, John Sinclair 2006)

The power of this publication, coming as it did so close to Sinclair’s death, is to be found in the detail of his method. By beginning with a single word, she, from the whole of the Bank of English, Sinclair simply requests the most



Chapter 16.  Consolidating empirical method in data-assisted stylistics 

frequent collocate from the Bank of English (approximately 500 million words of running text). The computer provides it: when. The results are then merged: when + she. A new search is initiated for the most frequent collocate of this twoword phrase. The computer provides it: was. The concordances are scrutinized and cultural insights are gathered. This may appear to be a fairly unremarkable exercise, but its methodology is highly significant. Notice that no structural criteria are invoked by the investigator. Sinclair is not asking for sentences. Collocation has no interest in sentence boundaries. It is abstracted from syntax and operates above structure as we have known it for the past 3500 years. The significance of this finding is that Sinclair has opened for empirical study the context of culture and the context of situation. As a result, it becomes easy to determine the precise degree of under-provision or over-provision (Louw 2000) of those contexts that particular authors have chosen to offer the reader.

4.  The path of methodology after the ‘digital turn’ in stylistics The impact of Sinclair’s Phrasebite is likely to alter radically the way in which stylistic methodology is ordered and perceived for use after the digital turn. This is likely to result in two main types of alteration to existing methodology: (1) the order in which the stylistic investigator proceeds and his/her commitment to scientific methods, and, (2) the re-writing of all glossaries of literary terms in order to make their definitions scientific rather than simply intuitive. We shall examine each of these in turn. 4.1  Re-ordering stylistic investigation There was a period during which stylistics slavishly followed the same order and procedures as linguistic fieldwork. A good example was the work of Jakobson. He was adamant that stylistic inquiry should deal primarily with stylistic concerns so as not to run the risk of replicating all of one’s primary data (Culler 1975: 73). However, because the work of stylistics was forced to run parallel to linguistic inquiry, stylistics of this kind began to suffer from all of the myopia of linguistics itself and, in consequence, took very few steps to check the nature of what was being sought in the name of stylistic evidence. The preoccupation at the time with the notion of style as deviation did little to uncouple the study of style from that of the norm against which style was purportedly to be recognized. When Jakobson was writing about the poetic function, the delexical-relexical continuum was unknown for the reason that the Cobuild technologies of John Sinclair had not yet begun to disclose it. In a

 Bill Louw

lengthy footnote in Trust the Text, Sinclair (2004a) comments upon the delexicalization-relexicalization continuum and its potential use for stylistic investigation (see also Louw 1991). W. E. Louw (personal communication) argues that ‘literal’ and ‘figurative’ are points close to the extremities of a continuum of delexicalization. Words can gradually lose their full lexical meaning, and become available for use in contexts where some of that full meaning would be inappropriate; this is the so-called figurative extension. Louw points out that a writer, especially a literary writer, must exercise vigilance so that the meaning of each word is interpreted at the intended point on the continuum. Such features as collocation are part of the control mechanism available to the writer. (emphasis added)  (Sinclair 2004a, 198)

By opening up the contexts of situation and culture for direct empirical examination at the level of collocation, Sinclair discarded once and for all time stylisticians’ reliance upon structure into the future. It is now possible to begin stylistic investigation at the far end of what used to appear to be the telos of stylistic investigation: literary worlds. The direction of investigation set out under the heading Firth and Malinowski in Table 1 above has now been made fully possible because it has been automated by Sinclair through digital collocation, as demonstrated by his method in Phrasebite. Stylistics has freed itself from any sense of duty or compulsion to follow the levels and direction of linguistic field work. 4.2  Th  e notions micro and macro as criteria for the ordering of investigation Method has always been a major interest of stylisticians, although the apparently jumbled nature of their work often suggests otherwise. The analogue tradition in stylistics has its own famous methodological milestones, such as the objectivesubjective criteria insisted upon by Riffaterre (1971), and the Fowler-Bateson debate. But the arrival of the corpus began to look remarkably like the answer to the verification principle of the logical positivists. The use of a corpus for the purpose of literary stylistics seemed likely to invite eclectic verification of any detail provided by the investigator (micro criteria) rather than supplant analogue methodology overnight with full automation (macro criteria). There was a further advantage: the corpus looked set to democratize criticism by banishing esoteric practices and attitudes replacing them with objectivity. 4.2.1  Micro tasking and collocation One major attraction of using digital collocation as the instrument for carrying out a data-assisted reading is that micro tasks can be accomplished very quickly and easily using a corpus of natural language in conjunction with the target



Chapter 16.  Consolidating empirical method in data-assisted stylistics 

literary texts in a machine-readable form. For example, the status of a keyword such as ‘common’ in the novel Great Expectations can be very easily checked by issuing a search command that caters for this micro-task alone and comprehensively, through the use of wild-card methods: *common* (Louw, 2007e: 93). A larger task may involve searching the ‘rise and fall of emotions’ in a single poem by Hopkins (Louw 2007e: 103). However, since the publication of Phrasebite by John Sinclair, investigators need no longer balk at undertaking macro tasks that may operate across a whole work of art and across all of contemporary society. It is the search for these features that begins to allocate new priorities for the entire undertaking of data-assisted readings using digital collocation and natural language corpora. Sinclair’s method in Phrasebite impels the investigator to respect frequency as a criterion for the prioritization of methodology. Close reading need no longer be dominated by any sense of duty to proceed from a detail in the target text, such as the claw, as part of a journey towards considering the lion, according to Spitzer’s (1948) famous maxim: ex ungue leonem (from the claw … the lion). The way is open for moving above syntax and dealing directly and empirically with worlds, both real and fictional (Louw, 2007a). 4.2.2  Macro tasking and the ordering of investigation At the very beginning of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and as early as its second line (1.1), Wittgenstein (1922: 7) offers us a theory of worlds that simultaneously invites expansion into literary worlds and their automation by means of digital collocation. 1.1 The world is the totality of facts not of things.

The naïve analogue view of collocation once fancied that collocation would be concerned primarily with the ontology of things. We see evidence for this even in Firth’s taxonomy for the incorporation into language study of Malinowski’s context of situation. A: The relevant persons, personalities; B: The relevant objects…

(Firth 1957: 182)

However, it becomes immediately apparent once digital collocation is applied to Wittgensteinian facts or Sachverhalten, i.e., states of affairs, that these are capable of accomplishing the macro-task not only of sketching the literary world of a work of art, but also, and for the first time, of determining its symbolism (how it is ‘thrown + together’, Greek: syn + ballein). This is accomplished by examining not only the collocates that occur in the text, but also by examining those collocates which are empirically recoverable in natural language, but which are not actualized in the text by the author. Such collocates are paradoxically empirically present, but

 Bill Louw

do not occur. Developments of this kind must begin to impinge upon the vision of literary theorists such as Barthes (1967) and Macherey (1966). This type of activity is indicative of the paradigm-shift involved in the transition from analogue to digital stylistics. The term digital stylistics is preferred to corpus stylistics for the reason that the term corpora often applies to published work that is based upon the use of unsuitable collections of text, such as (a) small homemade, annotated collections; (b) sub-corpora associated with particular genres or language varieties, or (c) corpora that are dated and manifestly too small to act as reliable samples of the whole language. The Brown Corpus and the lob corpus fall into the latter category. It is likely to exert a great deal of influence on the question of the ordering of stylistic investigation’s ‘after path’ now that the digital turn has been brought about (Louw 2008, forthcoming). It will determine the method of stylistics well into the future because it heralds the status of collocation as instrumentation or the control mechanism (Sinclair 2004a: 181) for meaning. In the same way that Sinclair’s Phrasebite operates in the context of culture and situation in the real world, so symbolism sketches the operation of the literary world. The collocates common to both actual and virtual worlds are material to the creation of the poem’s symbolism. The following example sets this out in detail. It formed part of a presentation by the author (Louw 2007d) at the acorn Corpus Symposium in honor of the late John Sinclair delivered at Aston University in May 2007. Kismet Opal fires in the Western sky   (For that which is written must ever be), And a bullet comes droning, whining by,   To the heart of a sentry close to me. For some go early, and some go late   (a dying scream on the evening air) And who is there that believes in Fate   As a soul goes out in the sunset flare?       R.B. Marriott-Watson            Killed in action, 1918

(Source: Up the Line to Death: The War Poets 1914–1918. An anthology arranged by Brian Gardner (1982). London: Methuen.) The forms that appear in italics in the poem are, upon data-assisted scrutiny, capable of segmenting, or to adapt Sinclair’s (1991: 132) term, ‘chunking’ the poem’s literary world by means of a shared delexical collocate such as fire. The term fire is common to several Wittgensteinian states of affairs. However, as these are brought into proximity with one another, they proceed to relexicalize one another within the nine word window of collocative power. This occurs across the entire fabric of the poem (Louw 1991). Once relexicalization begins in the poem, the



Chapter 16.  Consolidating empirical method in data-assisted stylistics 

nine-word window expands the ambit of its power to accommodate all of the instances that the process symbolism requires. This phenomenon is also dealt with elsewhere by this author as the ‘zombie effect’. This refers to the process by which dead metaphors twitch when they are relexicalized through the power of collocation (2007b: 160). Relexicalization, by means of shared collocates, sketches the poem’s literary world. This activity explains, for the first time in digital stylistics, the way in which symbolism operates in its ancient sense. Observe how the collocate fire, occurs separately in the four states of affairs (Sachverhalten): opals, Western skies, bullets, and flares. From these it expands semantically by means of the collocation’s power to relexicalization the shared collocate fire into a symbol. Note carefully, also, how collocates may appear in the collocation lists, but not in the poem. This startling phenomenon remained almost entirely unnoticed by literary critics during the analogue period of stylistics. Macherey (1966) referred unwittingly to the phenomenon as absence, just as we saw that the term life is the absent collocate of gap in the poem by Fleur Adcock earlier. However, the appearance of an absence as empirical evidence is an entirely corpus-based phenomenon and constitutes proof that there has been a paradigm shift in stylistics after the digital turn. For this reason, the collocation lists from the bnc for the literary world of the poem Kismet are set out below. In the collocation lists that follow, the number of citations obtained appears adjacent to the form at the top of the list. Notice how in some of the columns the most frequent fully lexicalized word is sometimes more frequent than the collocate that is shared by several states of affairs. Such instances have a bearing upon the tone of the literary criticism which these frequent forms begin to generate. For example, gybe emphasizes the fact that flare is associated with anger. Senseless loss of life during wars provokes anger. The injuries (wounds and head) caused by bullets outweigh the mere fact that they are fired. The bullet in the poem simply comes to do its work. The concordances from the bnc for Western sky deliver four lines of fiery descriptions. A larger corpus such as The Bank of English would improve upon this by providing greater detail.

.  The author conducted a nine-hour workshop at the University of Granada, Spain entitled ‘Establishing the Digital Turn’ on the 50th anniversary of Roman Jakobson’s poetic function and dedicated to the memory of the late John Sinclair. The workshop was held between 14 and 18 January, 2008. A number of students at the University of Granada have agreed to take further, as part of their own research, a project to create and update a glossary of corpus-attested literary terms.

 Bill Louw

COLLOCATION LISTS for the poem KISMET opal* (130)

western sky (16)

bullet (792)

the 43 the 16 the 160 P 33 sky 16 in 124 a 29 in 5 P 118 of 28 was 4  ← and 69 and 27 his 61 in 13 a 52 with 12 through 39 an 10 to 37 you 10 from 31 fire 9  ← him 26 it 22 into 22 wound 22  head 22 fired 21  kismet (10) believes in (233) P 5 of 3 new 3 H 3 Fate 2 

←

the he and that P a who of

91 57 50 38 35 31 30 29

flare (358)

← ←

the a of P and up to in from that her into it with was at by this for after had which as off could when gybe another is sudden you one she fired

169 121 96 85 68 48 41 36 18 18 18 17 17 17 16 15 14 14 14 14 13 12 12 11 11 11 11  10 10 10  10 9 9 8 

← ← ←



Chapter 16.  Consolidating empirical method in data-assisted stylistics  it in she but if one God

20 20 15 14 13 12 11 

←

Note how all of those ‘states of affairs’ that share the collocate fire not only relexicalize the term throughout the work of art, but utilize the logical space (Wittgenstein, 1922: 17) occupied by these states of affairs in order to sketch the literary world and draft the textual literary criticism which pertains to it. As opals are rotated disclosing their fire, so their symbolism resembles a human life governed by fate or God. Logical space demands that the person who fires the bullet cannot be the same Person that fired the flare of human life. That Person is God: the unspoken logical link between the two parts of the literary world: fire and fate. 2.19 ‘Logical pictures can depict the world.’

(Wittgenstein 1922: 17)

5.  Method is derived from the priorities revealed by research Corpus stylistics only began in earnest once natural language corpora had become large enough to represent a reliable sample of natural language in action. For example, it was once traditional for corpora to amount to exactly one million words of running text. The lob and Brown corpora followed this model. Even the first Cobuild corpus and its reserve corpora came in at 21 million words of running text. This greatly enhanced the potential of the corpus for ‘sampling’ the whole language in relation to providing a data-assisted reading of any single line of a literary text provided by the stylistician. Fortunately, this has never been seriously disputed, because the research and development of such corpora was lexicographic and therefore always had this type of sampling as its main criterion. The development of a corpus large enough to enable the automated creation of two editions of Cobuild English dictionaries was the brainchild of John Sinclair. The first computerconcordanced dictionary in the world emerged in 1978. The first paper in corpus stylistics (Louw 1989) was delivered at the British Council workshop on language and literature at St Hilda’s College Oxford in April 1987. From 1987 to the present day, the methodology for corpus stylistics has advanced only in relation to the major findings of the research, as the table below seeks to elucidate. The third column of the table is the ultimate objective of this paper, because whenever a paradigm shift takes place or is accomplished in a discipline, its terminology needs to be systematically and scientifically re-defined.

 Bill Louw

The digital turn marks such a paradigm-shift because it marks the moment at which stylistics, by means of collocation, freed itself from being treated as a structural and syntactic phenomenon. The boundaries of science in this regard were not only of interest to Firth, Wittgenstein, Malinowski, Jakobson and Sinclair, but are an area in which contemporary researchers ought to be dedicated and active. Table 2.  Table showing the derivation of method and definitions in corpus stylistics Research 

→

(Louw unless stated & chronological)



Taxonomy & Methodology 

→

Glossary

Methodology preferred

→

entries

→

Close reading * Worlds and Symbolism 1987; *‘When + she + was’ (Sinclair, Phrasebite©) delexicalisation *Co-selection 1991; *All devices relexicalise Semantic Pros. *Delexicalisation is not 1993; metaphor First TaLC: *First move to science Terminology *Semantic pros. Binarity 1997; and science in exceptions, 1st falsification of *Semantic prosodies expanded(cpt) Halliday; *Collocation automates or 1999 (censored); falsfifies: paper for AACL 2008 Contextual (rejected: ‘conference full’) Prosodic * Approaches book revived by Theory (CPT): science Routledge, after its delay by Hoey. 2000; *Truth Studies (Truth and Reconciliation 2nd falsification Commission) TRC 2003; 1st mention philosophers TaLC6 2004 (published in 2007a); Worlds: Watson & Zyngier (Eds) Concordance instrumentation Sabotaged by large fonts 2006; Sinclair publishes Phrasebite© 2006; ACORN Keynote: Worlds and Wittgenstein

*worlds *co-select *delexical *relexical *metaphor *symbol *state of affairs *irony *insincerity *semantic prosody *device

(Continued)



Chapter 16.  Consolidating empirical method in data-assisted stylistics 

Table 2.  Continued Research 

→

Taxonomy & Methodology 

→

Glossary

2007d; Relexicalisation Jakobson poetic function falsified Miller & Turci (Eds) 2007b Approaches to Corpus Stylistics (Routledge) delayed by Hoey.

This table is intended to show how the products of research do not automatically feed into methodology. The column on the left establishes the chronological order in which research is undertaken. The middle column ranks the findings from the first column in order of their importance to digital stylistics. The final column indicates how methodology needs to be anchored in a scientific form within a glossary of terms. Once this third stage has been reached, the glossary will need constant updating in order to incorporate new scientific findings as well as to exclude examples of poor science such as hybridization as well as methodological backsliding. If this procedure had been carried out after the death of J.R. Firth in December, 1960, the misleading reining back of collocation into syntax by Halliday (1966) might have been detected immediately and the damage it has caused to scholarship could have been avoided. One reason why semantic prosody is under constant attack (Hoey 2005, Whitsitt 2005, Hunston 2007) may be ascribed to the fact that its status as a scientific fact has not been settled in an appropriate corpus-attested glossary. Hunston (2007: 262) poignantly appears to miss the subtle relexicalization of point in the examples she puts forward as an apparent exception to the semantic prosody operating within to the point of. She offers to the point of gentleness, but without noticing the relexicalizing collocate fierce within the 9 word window, which stands ready to sharpen the point a little. The form is an exception because it is a device. 6.  A scientific, corpus-attested glossary of literary terms If the products of research are not immediately converted into scientific practice, we can expect backsliding and hybridization to rein back our best digital research into analogue paths and methods. For this reason it is important that we offer guidance to stylisticians until the digital turn is fully established. Constant reinforcement of the manner in which literary devices operate as science is required as part of this process. The work of the hybridizers must be detected as quickly

 Bill Louw

as possible and stamped out. Strenuous gate-keeping will be needed as part of this process of detection with a view to keeping falsifiable definitions and entries out of any proposed Glossary of Corpus-Attested Literary Terms. As the status of collocation as instrumentation becomes established, entries based upon intuition will gradually be banished, until all definitions contained in such a glossary are verifiable through the replication, using other or newer corpora, of the phenomena involved. This process will also safeguard all procedure against the homogenization of the corpus as an instrument (see Louw, forthcoming, for a comparison of the ‘sampling’ of the term natural justice in the British National Corpus and the Bank of English). This paper concludes by offering several draft entries for a potential glossary of corpus-attested literary terms. Successive editions of the glossary will tighten up the definitions in relation to the advancement of science alone, rather than the hopeful outpourings of theorists whose work is vitiated ab initio by being based upon the unverifiable tenets of psychologism. Hoey (2005) falls into this category. 6.1  Sample entries for a scientific glossary of literary terms The following sample entries are derived from some of the terms to be found in the third column of Table 2 above. They are not in alphabetical order for several reasons. Research findings cannot be classified by means of alphabetical order and the account of these advances are still in early draft. However, the final volume in which they appear will, of course, be organized in alphabetical order for ease of reference. Items in upper case in the entries cross-refer to other entries in the glossary.

Specimen Entries Worlds Literary worlds may be derived from Wittgenstein’s (1922: 7) assertion that: ‘The world is the totality of facts, not of things’. Facts are defined by Wittgenstein as ‘states of affairs’. Collocation and the technique of co-selection, between them auto­mate Wittgenstein’s Picture Theory of Meaning and verify Sinclair & Maurenen’s (2006) Local Unit Grammar. This marks the point where textual and contextual ‘chunking’ meet. Where several states of affairs share a collocate, such as fire, the relexicalization of that collocate acts as a symbol whose involvement in several states of affairs, together sketch the literary world of the work in question. The world and literary criticism of it are further assembled on the



Chapter 16.  Consolidating empirical method in data-assisted stylistics 

basis of Wittgenstein’s (1922: 17) principle that states of affairs operate within logical space.

Irony Where a reversed semantic prosody is deliberate rather than inadvertent, we may assume that we are dealing with irony (Louw 1993). In a monolithically positive or negative semantic prosody, the exceptions characteristically occupy 3% of the total number of citations. Of these, two citations are usually ironic and the third (out of 100 citations) insincere. The latter are distinguished by the fact that they are uttered or written inadvertently.

Insincerity Where a reversed semantic prosody is inadvertent rather than deliberate, we may assume that we are dealing with insincerity. The binary principle obtaining between irony and insincerity was shown by Louw (2000) using the distinction between a + recipe + for and the + recipe + for. The author found that the insincere forms must occupy the form a + recipe + for + success as the reductio ad absurdum of a scientific proof. This was found to be the case without exception and within a sufficiently large sample of text to establish the scientific nature of semantic prosody (Louw 1993; 2000). In the case of insincere instances the text writes the attitude of its author (Louw 1993).

Metaphor Literary metaphor is usually the product of upward collocation (See the interview of John Sinclair by Wolfgang Teubert in the osti Report, Krishnamurthy, 2004: xxiii). The term metaphor is subject to confusion as a result of Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980; 2003) misleading description of what analogue stylistics might have termed ‘dead metaphor’. In reality, the metaphors described by these scholars are delexical forms rather than metaphors at all. They are the dead metaphors that form the bulk of ordinary language. Unless they are relexicalized, they do not qualify as devices and ought not to be referred to as metaphors and are useless to the pursuit of stylistics. The fact that Lakoff & Johnson refer to them as metaphors may well be a product of the fake relexicalization which takes place when examples are offered in the form of citation forms and out of context (See Frege 1884 & Philip 2003).

 Bill Louw

Semantic prosody Two senses of semantic prosody are distinguished by Louw (1993; 2000). The first of these involves meaning through contagion by a collocate or set of collocates, through frequency, to impart a negative, positive or specialized meaning to a particular form. Specialized semantic prosodies are identified by Louw (1993) in the example fine, which is positive when applied to inanimate objects and ironic and negative in the case of animate persons such as friend. The substance of semantic prosodies is delexical, but in the case of irony and insincerity (created by means of breaching the semantic prosody) they are relexicalised, as are all devices. Sinclair (2004a) derives semantic prosodies structurally, by proceeding through linguistic levels in the normal direction associated with linguistic fieldwork. Louw (2000) by way of contrast derives them directly from Firthian and Malinowskian contexts of culture and contexts of situation, reversing the customary direction of linguistic field-work. Louw (2000) argues in his second and amplified definition of semantic prosody that they are a product of fractured contexts of situation: characterized by subtraction in the case of negative semantic prosody and by over-provision in the case of positive semantic prosody. The process involves seeing Firth’s taxonomy for context of situation and context of culture as being automated by collocation. Another name for this process is contextual prosodic theory. Semantic prosody has many detractors and hybridizers whose criticism is entirely intuitive and unsupported by corpus methods. Hoey (2005) and Whitsitt (2005) fall into this category.

7.  Conclusion J.R. Firth once declared that scientific facts do not exist until they are stated. This is the common objective of all contributors to this volume. We ought not to allow instrumentation and the digital turn in stylistics to be defeated simply because we can see that it is at hand. If we are at last dealing with settled knowledge in stylistics, it needs, as Bertrand Russell advised, to be handed over to science. Philosophers and scientists seem to be more equal to this task than linguists and stylisticians. The allegiance of the latter to ‘schools of thought’ are likely for some time to come to be more of a hindrance than a help.



Chapter 16.  Consolidating empirical method in data-assisted stylistics 

References Abrams, M.H. 1957. A Glossary of Literary Terms. New York NY: Holt, Rinehart, Winston. Alvarez, A. 1964. The New Poetry. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Barthes, R. 1967. Elements of Semiology. London: Cape. Bazell, C.E. et al. (eds). 1966. In Memory of J.R. Firth. London: Longman. Belsey, C. 1980. Critical Practice. London: Methuen. Burge, T. 2005. Truth, Thought, Reason: Essays on Frege. Oxford: OUP. Cook, G. 2000. Language, Play, Language Learning. Oxford: OUP. Culler, J. 1975. Structuralist Poetics. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Enkvist, N.E. 1973. Linguistic Stylistics. The Hague: Mouton. Firth, J.R. 1957. Papers in Linguistics 1934–1951. Oxford: OUP. Fortunati, V. Forthcoming. Proceedings of the World Conference on Primitivism 2005. (to appear in Italian) Bologna. Frege, G. 1884/1974. The Foundations of Arithmetic: A Logico-Mathematical Enquiry into the Concept of Number, transl.by J.L. Austin. Oxford: Blackwell. Gardner, B. 1982. Up the Line to Death: The War Poets 1914–1918. London: Methuen. Halliday, M.A.K. 1966. Lexis as a linguistic level. In In Memory of J.R. Firth, C.E. Bazell et al. (eds), 148–162. London: Longman. Hoey, M.H. 2005. Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language. London: Routledge. Hunston, S. 2007. Semantic prosody revisited. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 12(2): 249–268. Krishnamurthy, R. 2004. English Collocation Studies: The OSTI Report. London: Continuum. Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. 1980/2003. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Larkin, P. 1988. Collected Poems. Ed.by A. Thwaite. London: Faber. Louw, W.E. 1989. Sub-routines in the integration of language and literature. In Literature and the Learner: Methodological Approaches [British Council ELT Documents 130], 47–54. London: MEP. Louw, W.E. 1991. Classroom concordancing of delexical forms and the case for integrating language and literature. In Classroom Concordancing ELR Journal 4, T. Johns & P. King (eds), 151–178. Louw, W.E. 1993. Irony in the text or insincerity in the writer? The diagnostic potential of semantic prosodies. In Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair, M. Baker, let al. (eds), 157–176. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Louw, W.E. 1997. The role of corpora in critical literary appreciation. In Teaching and Language Corpora, A. Wichmann et al. (eds), 240–251. Harlow: Longman. Louw, W.E. 2000. Contextual prosodic theory: Bringing semantic prosodies to life. In Words in Context: In Honour of John Sinclair, C. Heffer & H. Sauntson (eds), 48–94. Birmingham: ELR. Louw, W.E. 2003. Dressing up waiver: A stochastic-collocational reading of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Harare: mimeo. Also available in the Occasional Papers dei Quaderni del CeSLIC at http://www.lingue.unibo.it/ceslic/e_occ_papers.htm. Louw, W.E. 2007a. Truth, literary worlds and devices as collocation. In Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Teaching and Language Corpora, E. Hidalgo, L. Quereda & J. Santana (eds), 329–362. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

 Bill Louw Louw, W.E. 2007b. Collocation as the determinant of verbal art. In Verbal Art Re-Visited, D. Miller & M. Turci (eds), 149–180. London: Equinox. Louw, W.E. 2007c. Corporibus Phlogiston: A Gentle Refutation of Michael Hoey’s Theory of Lexical Priming. Harare: Mimeo. Louw, W.E. 2007d. Are literary texts and their worlds ‘thrown together’ as collocation? Keynote presentation to ACORN Symposium, in Honour of John Sinclair, on 4th May 2007. www. aston.ac.uk/symposium.htm. Louw, W.E. 2007e. Literary worlds as collocation. In Literature and Stylistics for Language Learners: Theory and Practice, G. Watson & S. Zyngier (eds), 91–105. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Louw, W.E. 2008 . Two chapters in Approaches to Corpus Stylistics, D. Hoover et al. London: Routledge. Macherey, P. 1966. Pour une Theorie de la Production Litteraire. Paris: Maspero. Malinowski, B. 1935. Coral Gardens and their Magic. London: Allen and Unwin. Miller, D. & Turci, M. (eds). 2007. Verbal Art Revisited. London: Equinox. Morrison, B. & Motion, A. (eds). 1982. Contemporary British Poetry. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Palmer, F.R. 1957/1968. Selected Papers by J.R. Firth 1952–1959. London: Longman. Philip, G.S. 2003. Collocation and Connotation: A Corpus-Based Investigation of Colour Words in English and Italian. PhD dissertation, University of Birmingham. Riffaterre, M. 1971. Essais de Stylistique Structurale. Paris: Flammarion. Sebeok, T.A. 1960. Style in Language. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Sinclair, J.M. et al. 1987/1993. Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary. London: HarperCollins. Sinclair, J.M. 1987. Looking Up: An Account of the COBUILD Project in Lexical Computing. London: HarperCollins. Sinclair, J.M. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: OUP. Sinclair, J.M. 2004a. Trust the Text. London: Routledge. Sinclair, J.M. 2004b. Reading Concordances. London: Longman. Sinclair, J.M. 2006. Phrasebite. Pescia: TWC. Sinclair, J.M. & Mauranen, A. 2006. Linear Unit Grammar: Integrating Speech and Writing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Spitzer, L. 1948. Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Watson, G. & Zyngier, S. (eds). 2006. Literature and Stylistics for Language Learners: Theory and Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Weber, J.J. 1996. The Stylistics Reader. London: Arnold. Whitsitt, S. 2005. A critique of the concept of semantic prosody. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 10(3): 283–305. Wittgenstein, L. 1922. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. D.F. Pears & D.F. McGuiness (transl.), 1960. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

part iv

REDES Project: The New Generation

REDES Project: The new generation Introduction Instead of closing the book, the chapters in this section actually stand as the beginning, or ‘the new generation’ of international research. Willie van Peer’s work, as mentioned in the introduction to this volume, has influenced a number of people. Here, we would like to emphasize the example he has set for young researchers and scholars to be. In 2002, Willie van Peer co-founded the Research and Development in Empirical Studies Project (redes) with Sonia Zyngier and Frank Hakemulder at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. At that time, the project was triggered by a common desire to foster intercultural studies, building a bridge between the countries involved, namely, Germany, Brazil and the Netherlands. Moreover, the three co-founders believed students would gain from actively participating in research from the very early years of their university life, and, therefore, should be encouraged to develop their ideas and carry out their own studies. They assumed that, with proper supervision, these students would be better prepared for engaging in the academic world and would also be more aware of the stages involved in research (for a detailed account of the Project, see Viana et al. 2007). As stated in the Project’s philosophy, collaboratively written by its members in 2005, being a redes member “implies commitment, self-discipline, academic generosity, mutual respect and, in many cases, volunteer work” (Viana et al. 2007: 48). By now, several young researchers have had the experience of working in cooperation with students from different countries. Many papers have already been published (see Zyngier, Chesnokova & Viana 2007 for a collection of such articles), which stand as a proof that students can give relevant contributions to the academic community. No one expects them to undergo this experience relying solely upon themselves. On the contrary, being part of redes means holding hands and fighting battles together. This project aims at being more than an academic group. It is also a way of life, in which people are invited to act as a team, sharing research ideas, cultural backgrounds and personal experiences. redes members believe individuals contribute more to society when they are united in search for their goals. As a result, not only academic studies are carried out, but also bonds, both professional and personal, are made among people.

 Directions in Empirical Literary Studies

In this section, the reader will find papers written basically by the new generation. Different from the previous sections, in this one there is no thematic thread. The papers stand as an illustration of how far junior researchers can go alone or in collaboration with senior members. The section opens with a chapter by Vander Viana, Natália Silveira and Sonia Zyngier, who represent the Brazilian branch of redes (see Viana 2007 for review). Their study presents an index of literariness based on three variables regarding the materiality of 46 literary works. With the help of a more objective method, the authors investigate how varied lexical items and their combinations are in each of the texts. They also check whether there is a correlation between the index of lexical variety they propose and the traditional subjective selection of a literary canon. From a more general perspective, the chapter shows how Corpus Linguistics can be used for the analysis of literature. Mariya Sergeyeva and Anna Chesnokova, redes members in Ukraine (see Sergeyeva & Rumbesht 2007 for the impact of the Project in this country), sign the second chapter. They focus on issues related to foreign language learning in their country. According to the main hypothesis of the study, the Russification or Ukrainization policies impact the way Ukrainians react to learning English. Ukrainian citizens’ attitudes are closely related to their previous school and academic experiences, whether in their native language or not. All in all, the paper points out to the importance of such aspects when learning a foreign language. Another representative of the Ukrainian redes Project Group, Vladimir Yepishev deals with the difficulties involved in translating proper names in The Lord of the Rings. As this is a multilingual trilogy, the names of the characters reflect their origin or have an impact on the plot. The author investigates how these names have been translated into Ukrainian and Russian. The text raises an important issue as to what should be taken into consideration when translating a work of art. In “North Korea’s ‘dangerous’ ways – reason for panic or a real threat?”, Jan Prasil, Maria Dudusova and Jan Auracher, members of the German branch of redes, investigate the influence of the media on the way citizens perceive North Korea. They focus on participants from different countries and the fear they might have after reading the official press release about the nuclear test held in North Korea. This text highlights the impact of the press on people’s assumptions of the world. The section closes with a chapter by Maciej Maryl from Poland. Although not officially a redes member since there is no branch of the Project in his country as yet, Maryl shares the spirit of redes, and his research has developed, in a way, because of his contacts with Willie van Peer. Maryl’s contribution focuses on noncanonical works and literary education. Although the study of literature in school settings is based on canonized literary works, the author reminds us most people rely on other kinds of reading in their daily routine. Therefore, Maryl reinforces the importance of non-canonical works in education.



REDES Project: The new generation 

Inserting this section in the present volume shows that quality papers do not have to come together with academic prestige. More importantly, they pay a great homage to Willie van Peer. Such a section could not be left out from this Festschrift as Willie van Peer himself has been one of redes most enthusiastic members. By so doing, he has inspired many students, helping them through their projects and future careers in the university context. This has materialized in various ways, even when he is not aware of them as is the case with this volume. Milena Mendes Section Editor

References Sergeyeva, M. & Rumbesht, A. 2007. redes in Ukraine. igel Newsletter [online] 19. Available from http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/igel/Newsletter19.htm# Ukraine [Accessed on 01 April 2007]. Viana, V.P. 2007. redes-BRA: past, present and future. IGEL Newsletter [online] 19. Available from http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/igel/Newsletter19.htm# Redes-BRA [Accessed on 01 April 2007]. Viana, V.P., Fialho, O., Sopcák, P., Sergeyeva, M. & Rumbesht, A. 2007. (In)visible networks in action: Four perspectives. In Acting and Connecting: Cultural Approaches to Language and Literature, S. Zyngier, A. Chesnokova & V. Viana (eds), 23–49. Münster: lit Verlag. Zyngier, S., Chesnokova, A. & Viana, V.P. (eds). 2007. Acting and Connecting: Cultural Approaches to Language and Literature. Münster: lit Verlag.

chapter 17

Empirical evaluation Towards an automated index of lexical variety Vander Viana, Natalia Silveira & Sonia Zyngier This chapter proposes an objective approach to the formal analysis of literary prose in English in order to investigate the relation between lexical density and judgments of canonicity. Based on the concepts of literariness proposed by the Russian Formalists and lexical variety, a mathematical index is designed, relating three variables which take the materiality of text into consideration: (a) relative frequency of lexical bundles, (b) lexical bundle type/token ratio, and (c) word type/token ratio. The index is described and illustrated with 46 canonical and non-canonical literary works. Statistical analysis shows no significant relation between lexical richness and decisions of what has been classified as canonical, indicating that these judgments may be influenced by factors other than the text itself. Keywords:  lexical variety, Corpus Linguistics, literary discourse, empirical study, canonicity, lexical bundles

1.  Introduction Almost a century has gone by since the Russian Formalists proposed a systematized approach to literary studies, one which challenged the notion that the quality of literature could be decided by elements other than the text itself, to make a “stone stony” (Shklovsky 1917/1965: 12). Their seminal ideas of literariness, foregrounding, and deviation are the starting point of this paper. By assuming that the materiality of texts was the working ground for literary studies, the Formalists inaugurated the interface between literature and linguistics. Following this proposal, numerous investigations have resorted to methods of linguistic analysis to explore and explain literary texts, their properties, and their relations to other types of texts (e.g., Jakobson & Lévi-Strauss 1962/1987;

 Vander Viana, Natalia Silveira & Sonia Zyngier

Fowler 1981; Carter & Simpson 1989; Carter & McRae 1996; Watson & Zyngier 2006, among others). What characterizes these publications is the departure from hermeneutics and other subjective techniques, and the promotion of replicable data analyses. The present study also breaks away from the hermeneutic tradition of literary studies by resorting to the tools provided by Corpus Linguistics, and thus offers a more objective look at textual features. Here lexical variety is taken as one important component of literariness and a selection of narrative prose in English is submitted to computerized analysis. The two research questions which guide the present study are (a) how varied the use of the lexicon in the works under scrutiny is and (b) whether there is any relation between lexical richness and canonicity.

2.  Theoretical foundations 2.1  Russian Formalism One of the most important notions defined by Russian Formalism is that of defamiliarization, proposed by Shklovsky ([1917] 1965). The term implies viewers’ estrangement from an object and the effect provoked by prolonging their perceptions. This effect can be brought about by linguistic constructions which introduce novelty and challenge established norms. Still according to Shklovksy ([1917] 1965), the function of art is to lead individuals to a renovation of their understanding of the world through that sort of aesthetic experience. The process of defamiliarization, in which reflexive reactions are deautomated and called into question, allows viewers/readers to appreciate the beauty of an artistic object. By systematically resorting to it, a work of art comes to display density of forms rather than communicative fluidity. In the case of literature, defamiliarization is achieved through the manipulation of linguistic forms so as to produce foregrounding. The term “foregrounding” is used here in the sense of the stylistic devices that lead to the psychological effect described above (for other uses, see van Peer & Hakemulder 2006). It goes back to the distinction between foreground and background in visual arts: in the process of foregrounding, the defamiliarized object is called to the foreground, or “highlighted”, by means of two types of mechanism: deviation or parallelism. Deviation occurs when linguistic structures go against readers’ expectations, from what has been naturalized by the speakers of a language. They are deviations in relation to the grammatical rules and/or social conventions associated with the language, and the expectations such rules and conventions give rise to. In non-technical



Chapter 17.  Empirical evaluation 

contexts, deviation is usually referred to as poetic license. By applying deviational techniques, writers create a contrast between what is default and what is novel – or background and foreground. On the other hand, parallelism is a controlled form of repetition in which traces of a structure are kept constant while others vary. It is possible that all traces are repeated, thus accounting for simple repetition. However, it is the manipulation of variety and repetition that creates contrasts leading to stylistic effects and defamiliarization. It is worth noting, however, that the process of defamiliarization is countered by refamiliarization (see Miall & Kuiken 1994; Fialho 2007). Readers make use of refamiliarization strategies to interpret the difficult forms triggered by foregrounding, which for that reason tend to become worn out. The performance of foregrounding devices depends on their freshness. Therefore, the linguistic choices in text must be varied and constantly innovative in order to produce the effect of what the Formalists called defamiliarization. Taking these concepts into account, Russian Formalists, and later Czech Structuralists, put forward the notion that literary texts are distinguished by literariness, a property that results from the coherent and systematic use of the stylistic resources discussed above (Sklovsky 1917/1965; Mukarovsky 1979). Such texts are, to their view, marked by innovation and unexpectedness in the use of language. Nowadays, literariness is not considered a feature exclusive to literature, but perceivable in other genres, such as advertisements (Carter & Nash 1990; Cook 1992). It has come to be seen in a continuum rather than as dichotomic set (Carter & Nash 1983). By focusing on the text, Russian Formalists left us what is arguably their greatest contribution: the development of a new paradigm for literary studies, one which emphasizes textual verbal art, thus implying that there are no themes or social contexts which determine a priori what literature is. It is true that the Formalists concentrated on the language of poetry and avoided analyzing prose. In this study, however, their concepts will be applied specifically to the area of prose writing to examine the issue of lexical density. 2.2  Corpus Linguistics In order to carry out computer-aided analysis of prose texts, the present study applies the principles and practices of Corpus Linguistics. This knowledge area has been described as “the modern face of empirical linguistics” (Teubert 1996: vi) for

.  For a more detailed account of novelty in art, see Martindale (this volume).

 Vander Viana, Natalia Silveira & Sonia Zyngier

it analyzes language in use. It proposes that linguistic investigations should leave aside invented instances and explain language by means of naturally-occurring examples. This, however, does not mean intuitions should disappear completely, but they should rather only play a role in generating hypotheses and not in confirming them (for a historical overview of Corpus Linguistics, see Viana & Zyngier, forthcoming). Corpus Linguistics looks at language from a different perspective: it reveals patterns of language use, indicating that words do not occur at random. They attract or reject one another, forming patterns. Therefore, there is a need to check how words behave, especially if one assumes that form and meaning are inseparable (Stubbs 1993: 2). One of the most important points in Corpus Linguistics is that of probability in linguistic choices. Examining language in use may tell us how probable it is for a specific linguistic item to occur in a given register. For the sake of illustration, Louwerse, Benesh & Zhang (this volume) argue that the sequence “and in” is the most distinctive language feature of literary texts, thus possibly characterizing such type of discourse. In his seminal work Corpus, Concordance, Collocation, Sinclair (1991) proposes two principles to describe language use. For the author, writers and/or speakers are bound to them at all times. The open choice principle assumes users of a given language are (almost completely) free to choose the words they want to use. The only constraints they have to face are those dictated by grammatical rules. The idiom principle covers language use from another angle: speakers and/or writers use combinations of words they have already been in contact with before. In fact, Sinclair’s principles have had great impact. Louw’s (1993) concept of semantic prosody seems to be a clear example of that. In his words, it corresponds to “a consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates” (Louw 1993: 157; also see Louw, this volume). Erman & Warren’s (2000) study shows that the idiom principle has an important role in language use as 55.38% of the choices made by both speakers and writers correspond to prefabricated structures. Wray’s (2002: 4) concept of formulaicity – “words and word strings which appear to be processed without recourse to their lowest level of composition” – also derives from Sinclair’s idiom principle. Similarly, Biber, Conrad & Cortes’s (2004: 372) statement that “much of our everyday language use is composed of prefabricated expressions” shows, in fact, Sinclair’s idiom principle at play. The authors forward the concept of lexical .  Prefabricated structures are more common in spoken (58.6%) than in written registers (52.3%).



Chapter 17.  Empirical evaluation 

bundle – “the most frequent recurring lexical sequences in a register” (Biber, Conrad & Cortes 2004: 376), which had originally been proposed in Biber et al. (1999). In other words, a lexical bundle is a sequence of words that meet certain previously defined criteria. In the specific case of the study reported, the authors worked with four-word sequences that needed to occur in at least 5 distinct texts and a minimum of 40 times per million tokens. In classifying texts, Sinclair’s (1991) two principles may be interpreted as the two ends of a continuum. The least innovative texts, that is, the ones in which lexical repetition is commonly found, are the ones in which the authors rely the most on the idiom principle. At the other end, where one can find a heavier influence of the open choice principle, there are those texts in which the writers make more use of different words. The poles are hypothetical as it would be difficult to conceive a text in which there is no repetition or no new words. This proposal may be mapped onto the notion of literariness proposed by the Russian Formalists in the sense that higher literariness would derive from novel and unexpected language use, thus being a product of the open choice principle. On the other hand, a text characterized by repetition would stand as an example of lower literariness, being one in which the idiom principle has a strong influence. In the next section, these concepts will be put to practice.

3.  Methodology For this study, a selection of 46 works of narrative prose in English was compiled, with first publication dates ranging from mid-18th century to late 20th century. It may seem at first that the broad time span, covering more than two centuries, would invalidate the present study. However, it should be stressed that although there is a comparison between the values obtained for each literary work under analysis, there is no cross-linguistic comparison among texts. Therefore, the time a literary work was produced does not skew the study. Out of the works analyzed, 27 are canonical (3 of which belong to children’s literature) while 19 are non-canonical.

.  Repeated sequences of words have been studied by a number of scholars and labeled in different ways (see Wray 2002; Biber, Conrad & Cortes 2004). Louwerse, Benesh & Zhang (this volume) use the concept of ‘n-gram’. In this chapter, the notion of ‘lexical bundle’ is preferred since Biber, Conrad & Cortes’s (2004) procedures for identifying these sequences are also followed.

 Vander Viana, Natalia Silveira & Sonia Zyngier

The literary works were transformed into text files, so as to allow later computer processing. First, some texts were manually digitalized from their printed editions, or, in the case of the public domain works, retrieved in digital form from Project Gutenberg. The resulting files were read, corrected and formatted in the second stage. Formatting standards were determined so as to avoid computer reading errors. Finally, the files were revised in order to ensure they were free from typos and/or other formatting problems. In relation to the units of analyses, both words and lexical bundles were employed. Words were identified as strings of letters and/or numbers with one space on each side (or a punctuation make to the left). Lexical bundles, as described by Biber, Conrad & Cortes (2004) (see Section 2.2), were identified as sequences of four words listed by the computer occurring at least 4 times per 100,000 tokens in a given text. All the 46 literary works were probed with WordSmith Tools (Scott 1999). This software offers three main tools: WordList, Concord and KeyWords. Here, WordList was used. This specific tool rendered data on the number of types (different words) and tokens (running words) of words and lexical bundles in each literary work, as well as the standardized type/token ratio of words (see Section 4 for an explanation of this ratio).

4.  Index of lexical variety Lexical variety is investigated in this study by means of three variables relating to either lexical bundles or words. In the first case, two measures are considered: their relative frequency and type/token ratio. In the second, just the standardized type/token ratio is focused. The first variable looks into how frequent lexical bundles are in each literary work. What is considered, however, is the relative frequency of bundles, so as not to allow for text size bias. The value is calculated by dividing the raw frequency of lexical bundles by the number of tokens in the text. The result is then multiplied by 100,000 to ensure that all values are compared on the same basis, that is, number of lexical bundles per 100,000 tokens. Repetition of lexical bundles is less likely to occur than that of words, since it is defined by the use of the same four words in a fixed order. The more bundles are found in a text, the more repetitive it is and the higher the final value.

.  Project Gutenberg is available at http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page. .  In the original study (Biber, Conrad & Cortes 2004), the figures are different (40 times per 1,000,000 tokens), but the ratio is the same.



Chapter 17.  Empirical evaluation 

The second variable covers variety among the identified lexical bundles. What is at play in this measure is not how frequent bundles are (for it has been accounted for in the previous variable), but how different they are. This is the type/token ratio of lexical bundles. The value is arrived at by dividing the number of different bundles (types) by the relative frequency of bundles. The use of relative frequency instead of the raw frequency ensures that the final value is not biased by the size of the literary work. Besides the mere occurrence of bundles, which is investigated in the first variable, it should be taken into account how often they are repeated. It seems that there is more variety in the use of 20 bundles four times each than of 10 bundles eight times each. In sum, the more varied bundles are, the higher the value the text has in this variable and the richer it is in terms of its lexis. The third and last variable is similar to the second one, but it focuses on word level. It looks into the variety of isolated (rather than combined) words, which is expressed by the standardized type/token ratio of words. This measure is automatically calculated by WordSmith Tools (Scott 1999) every time a word list is run. The regular type/token ratio is obtained by dividing the number of types (different words) by the number of tokens (running words). The result is then multiplied by 100 so that the final value is expressed in percentage. However, this value is subject to the size of the text: the bigger it is, the higher the probability of it being lower. This is why the standardized type/token ratio is used. It functions in the very same way, except for the fact that the software calculates the ratio for each group of a certain number of tokens. By default, these groups are set as 1,000 tokens. At the end, the program calculates a total average, which corresponds to the final result. Here, the higher the final figure, the more varied words are. The index of lexical variety is a product of four steps. First, all values obtained in each of the variables are normalized. Normalization involves the following calculation: (x – minimal value in the variable) – (maximal value in the variable – minimal value in the variable) where x is the result obtained by a specific literary work. For instance, Alice in Wonderland and The Picture of Dorian Gray originally scored, respectively, 4,850.07 and 4.03 in the relative frequency of lexical bundles. With these results, the conclusion that could be arrived at was that Alice in Wonderland is more repetitive that The Picture of Dorian Gray; however, it would not be possible to state what the minimum and the maximum values of the continuum are, making it difficult to interpret the results qualitatively. After normalization is carried out, Alice in Wonderland scores 1.000 whereas The Picture of Dorian Gray totals 0.000. These two literary works represent the minimum and maximum .  Since weights were assigned to the different criteria as will be explained later, the fact that their ranges (which originally had different orders of magnitude) were all normalized allowed for easy manipulation of the coefficients with which they were weighed.

 Vander Viana, Natalia Silveira & Sonia Zyngier

values possible after the results are normalized. It should be stressed that 0.000 means Oscar Wilde’s literary work is the one that contains fewer lexical bundles, that is, it is less repetitive at word-sequence level in the selection of 46 works under analysis. Conversely, the one by Lewis Carroll resorts to lexical bundles the most. Second, weights are attributed to each variable. It seemed senseless to treat all variables in the same way as two are based on lexical bundles while one is based on isolated words. After all, the probability of repeating bundles is lower than that of using the same words. A number of empirical tests were carried out, assigning different weights to the variables, so as to calibrate the index. In choosing the best design possible, it was assumed that James Joyce’s Ulysses should be among the first results (if not the first one) since it is known that this literary work is lexically rich and innovative. As a result, a double weight was attributed to the first two variables when compared to the third variable. In other words, the relative frequency of lexical bundles and their type/token ratio were assigned 2 whereas the standardized type/token ratio was assigned 1. However, as the relative frequency of lexical bundles differed from the other variables – a higher result would indicate more repetition – it was assigned a negative weight: –2. Third, the normalized results obtained in each literary work for each variable are multiplied by their respective weights and added up. The final result would correspond to the index of lexical variety. The most varied literary work would score 0.000, 1.000 and 1.000 in, respectively, relative frequency of lexical bundles, type/token ratio of lexical bundles and standardized type/token ratio of words, totaling 3.000. On the other end of the continuum, there would be a literary work scoring –2.000, 0.000 and 0.000, corresponding to –2.000. The fourth and last step in the calculus design is a consequence of the result obtained in the previous one. Were the index kept to its original form, it would range from –2.000 to 3.000. Thus, it could raise unwanted interpretation for negative results, i.e., that a literary work would be so repetitive that it would owe something to “default” language use. This is clearly not the case, especially because the index is relative and its values may change every time new works are included in it (although the relation among them is not affected). For this reason, it was decided to make the results positive by adding 2 to all of them. This way, the final index ranges from 0.000 to 5.000.

5.  Analysis Each of the selected 46 literary works was subjected to the procedure described in the previous section so as to arrive at the index of lexical variety. Table 1, which shows the results of the analysis, contains five columns. The first one indicates the



Chapter 17.  Empirical evaluation 

titles. The use of italics indicates a popular literary work whereas bold type signals a canonical one. The three asterisks after certain canonical literary works (in bold type) indicate that they are aimed at children. The second column [rf(B)] corresponds to the relative frequency of lexical bundles. The following two indicate type/token ratios: ttr(B) indicates the ratio for lexical bundles whereas sttr(W) stands for the standardized ratio for words. The last column (ILV) contains the final result for the index of lexical variety. The last row shows the weights which were assigned to the three variables. The 46 literary works are arranged according to their ILV in descending order. Table 1.  Literary works and their indexes of lexical variety

Work

rf(B)

ttr(B)

sttr(W)

ILV

Ulysses The Picture of Dorian Gray Jane Eyre Wuthering Heights Moby Dick Noble House The Beautiful and Damned Tess of the d’Urbervilles Nicholas Nickleby You Only Live Twice The Blind Assassin Bleak House The Mirror of the Sea The Voyage Out Live and Let Die The Handmaid’s Tale Pride and Prejudice The Da Vinci Code The Dark Half Great Expectations Thunderball The Secret of Chimneys David Copperfield On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Hard Times Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire The Garden Party and Other Stories The War of the Worlds Sons and Lovers

0.005 0.000 0.013 0.018 0.018 0.024 0.032 0.022 0.032 0.142 0.033 0.030 0.137 0.084 0.195 0.111 0.097 0.134 0.091 0.055 0.099 0.241 0.044 0.110 0.142 0.051 0.116 0.139 0.212 0.092

0.697 1.000 0.742 0.629 0.460 0.508 0.367 0.395 0.438 0.490 0.409 0.500 0.404 0.404 0.493 0.454 0.481 0.341 0.410 0.456 0.326 0.532 0.404 0.321 0.300 0.335 0.325 0.344 0.337 0.347

1.000 0.343 0.598 0.808 0.716 0.608 0.768 0.605 0.506 0.619 0.561 0.310 0.680 0.535 0.558 0.467 0.325 0.663 0.418 0.241 0.580 0.444 0.285 0.573 0.612 0.354 0.465 0.403 0.546 0.285

4.383 4.343 4.057 4.030 3.600 3.575 3.437 3.351 3.318 3.314 3.313 3.251 3.213 3.175 3.154 3.152 3.092 3.077 3.057 3.043 3.034 3.026 3.006 2.996 2.927 2.923 2.883 2.812 2.796 2.795 (Continued)

 Vander Viana, Natalia Silveira & Sonia Zyngier

Table 1.  Continued

Work

rf(B)

ttr(B)

sttr(W)

ILV

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes The Spy Who Loved Me Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone Our Mutual Friend The Portrait of a Lady Diamonds are Forever Peril at End House The Invisible Man Casino Royale The Wedding The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn The Notebook The Jungle Book*** Murder On The Orient Express A Christmas Carol*** Alice in Wonderland***

0.109 0.589 0.136 0.041 0.077 0.346 0.169 0.596 0.166 0.185 0.168 0.811 0.265 0.403 0.381 1.000 -2

0.320 0.766 0.274 0.270 0.271 0.432 0.328 0.674 0.204 0.291 0.386 0.736 0.159 0.268 0.143 0.000 2

0.373 0.424 0.497 0.307 0.316 0.523 0.259 0.406 0.480 0.328 0.000 0.226 0.211 0.244 0.393 0.000 1

2.795 2.778 2.773 2.764 2.703 2.695 2.577 2.562 2.557 2.539 2.436 2.074 1.998 1.974 1.917 0.000

The most varied literary work in the list, as expected, is Ulysses, scoring 4.383. At the end of Table 1, there is Alice in Wonderland, which scores 0.000 in the index, having obtained the lowest result possible in the three variables. Even though Alice in Wonderland is considered a canonical literary work, Lewis Carroll writes it for children. This may explain why there are numerous repetitions in the book and why it has achieved the minimum result possible. Table 1 may be divided into three segments. The upper one, containing 15 literary works, seems to mostly group canonical ones. There are only three works which are popular in this initial segment: Noble House, You Only Live Twice and Live and Let Die, two of which are of the same author – Ian Fleming – who signs the James Bond series. The last segment of 15 literary works spans from The Spy Who Loved Me to Alice in Wonderland. It mainly encompasses non-canonical literary works (8 instances) and children literature (3 instances). The appearance of children’s literature at the bottom of the list was already expected. Such texts are generally more repetitive than works written for adults, and it is reasonable to assume that their

.  It should be explained why there is not a literary work which obtains 5.000 in the index. This would correspond to that literary work which obtains the maximum results in each of the variables. So far this does not hold true for the analyzed texts. The Picture of Dorian Gray yields the best results in terms of bundles (the first two values in Table 1), respectively 0.000 and 1.000. However, it is Ulysses that scores highest in the third variable, obtaining 1.000.



Chapter 17.  Empirical evaluation 

authors resort to repetition as a means of appealing to the readers they address. Only four canonical works may be found here: Our Mutual Friend, The Portrait of a Lady, The Invisible Man and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It is interesting to point out that this last work – one in which an attempt was made to particularize the use of the vernacular in the Southern United States – repetition seems to have been a tool in the characterization of that use of language. In the middle part, there are 16 literary works, which are evenly distributed. One half consists of canonical works while the other encompasses popular ones. In order to check the possible significant relation between canonicity and the index of lexical variety, a correlation test was run for the distribution. A dichotomous variable ‘canonicity’ was created, and a value {1,0} was assigned to each work. That variable was correlated to ‘lexical variety’, the interval variable corresponding to the value each work obtained in the index. All 46 cases were considered. A Pearson correlation test yielded r = 0,132 for p = 0,190 with a one-tailed test, which means that no significant correlation was found. This finding indicates that there is not a strong relation between lexical richness, an important formal aspect of every text – and one interpreted here, within the theoretical framework of Russian Formalism, as an indicator of literariness – and judgments of canonicity. 6.  Final words Grounded on the notion of literariness and helped by the principles and tools of Corpus Linguistics, this study aimed at advancing in the investigation of lexical variety instead of relying only on the common standardized type/token ratio of words. This way an index of lexical variety was proposed considering not only words but also lexical bundles. The index showed how rich in terms of language use each literary work is. Canonical works seemed to be higher on the list while popular texts clustered towards the end. In the case of canonical works for children, the results showed they drifted to the end of the list. However, when the relation between lexical richness as modeled here and canonicity was tested statistically, results indicated that the correlation was not strong. This may lead to the conclusion that judgments of canonicity seem to be further distanced from textual aspects than usually assumed. In other words, the inclusion or exclusion of literary works from the canon of a specific culture may challenge the notion that textual features are strong indicators of canonicity. As far as the index is concerned, a number of aspects still need to be mapped. For instance, it does not capture different or new meanings of the same word, nor does it take metaphors into account. New variables need to be made operational. Other kinds of analyses can also enrich the final result. The rapid development in the field of Corpus Linguistics will possibly offer new ways to improve this index.

 Vander Viana, Natalia Silveira & Sonia Zyngier

References Biber, D., Conrad, S. & Cortes, V. 2004. If you look at…: Lexical bundles in university teaching and textbooks. Applied Linguistics 25(3): 371–405. Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. & Finegan, E. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman. Carter, R.A. & McRae, J. 1996. Language, Literature and the Learner. London: Longman. Carter, R.A. & Nash, W. 1983. Language and literariness. Prose Studies 6(2): 121–141. Carter, R.A. & Nash, W. 1990. Seeing through Language: A Guide for Styles of English Writing. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Carter, R.A. & Simpson, P. (eds). 1989. Language, Discourse and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Discourse Stylistics. London: Unwin Hyman. Cook, G. 1992. The Discourse of Advertising. London: Routledge. Erman, B. & Warren, B. 2000. The idiom principle and the open choice principle. Text 20: 29–62. Fialho, O.C. 2007. Foregrounding and refamiliarization: understanding readers’ response to literary texts. Language and Literature 16(2): 105–124. Fowler, R. 1981. Literature as Social Discourse: the Practice of Linguistic Criticism. London: Batsford Academic. Jakobson, R. & Lévi-Strauss, C. [originally published in 1962] 1987. Charles Baudelaire’s “Les Chats”. In Language in Literature, K. Pomorska & S. Rudy (eds), 180–197. Cambridge MA: Belknap. Louw, B. 1993. Irony in the text or insincerity in the writer? – The diagnostic potential of semantic prosodies. In Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair, M. Baker, G. Francis & E. Tognini-Bonelli (eds), 157–176. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Miall, D.S. & Kuiken, D. 1994. Foregrounding, defamiliarization, and affect: Response to literary stories. Poetics 22: 389–407. Mukarovsky, J. 1979. Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts. Oxford: Oxon. Scott, M. 1999. WordSmith Tools 3.0. Oxford: OUP. Shklovsky, V. 1917/1965. Art as technique. In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, L.T. Lemon & M.J. Reis (eds & transl), 3–24. Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press. Sinclair, J. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: OUP. Stubbs, M. 1993. British traditions in text analysis: From Firth to Sinclair. In Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair, M. Baker, G. Francis & E. Tognini-Bonelli (eds), 1–33. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Teubert, W. 1996. Editorial. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 1(1): iii–x. Van Peer, W. & Hakemulder, J. 2006. Foregrounding. In Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics, K. Brown (ed.), 546–551. Oxford: Elsevier. Viana, V. & Zyngier, S. Forthcoming. EFL through the digital glass of Corpus Linguistics. In Handbook of Research on E-Learning Methodologies for Language Acquisition, P.L. Torres & R. de C.V. Marriott (eds). Hershey PA: IGI Global. Watson, G. & Zyngier, S. (eds). 2006. Literature and Stylistics for Language Learners: Theory and Practice. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Wray, A. 2002. Formulaic Language and the Lexicon. Cambridge: CUP.

chapter 18

Language allergy Myth or reality? Mariya Sergeyeva & Anna Chesnokova The chapter examines the impact of Russification and Ukrainization policies on the attitude of Ukrainians towards foreign (English) language learning. The hypothesis is that people who had a negative experience with instruction in their non-native language are likely to experience the same reaction when learning another foreign language. To test this hypothesis, 96 participants filled in questionnaires to evaluate their experiences with studying in non-native languages and with English language learning. Results indicate that there is a strong correlation between experiences with instruction in non-native language and with learning foreign languages. Keywords:  language learning, motivation, Russification, Ukrainization, language allergy, empirical study

1.  Introduction With Ukraine in the process of building solid relations with, or even becoming a member of Western organizations such as the Council of Europe, the European Union, osce, wto, and preparing to become the host of world sports events (e.g., “Eurocup” 2012), awareness of the need for multicultural policies in this postSoviet country is rising fast. Among others, the issue of foreign language learning (English in particular, as lingua franca for international communication) is gradually receiving greater attention as an essential factor for becoming a member of the European and world community.

.  For explanation of difference between “Ukraine” and “the Ukraine”, please refer to http:// www.infoukes.com/faq/the_ukraine/ and http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/ukraine.html

 Mariya Sergeyeva & Anna Chesnokova

According to the Eurobarometer survey in 2001, while “47% of eu citizens spoke English well enough to hold a casual conversation” (European Commission 2001), no such figures exist in Ukraine – there are no statistical data on this issue. However, very rough figures gathered by means of a street-poll show that approximately only 1 Ukrainian out of 5 speaks English on a level sufficient for general communication. The street-poll was carried out in September 2007 by a Portuguese ex-patriot on one of the central streets of Kyiv. Twenty-eight randomly chosen people were asked in English to give directions to different places. Only 4 people showed an excellent knowledge of English, and 2 people demonstrated an ability to communicate in English sufficiently well. It is reasonable to assume that if the street-poll had been carried out in any other Ukrainian city, the figures would have definitely been much lower. Such wide discrepancy between knowledge of English in Western European countries and in Ukraine triggered the question of what factors are accountable for the lack of English language knowledge among the Ukrainian population. 2.  Why don’t Ukrainians speak English? According to the data collected in the Eurobarometer survey, there are 3 factors mentioned by the European respondents as discouragement from language learning: “lack of time (34%), motivation (30%), and expense of language classes (22%)” (European Commission 2006: 5). Analyzing the factors accountable for the lack of knowledge of English among the Ukrainian population, we distinguished the following factors: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

educational motivational geopolitical environmental emotional.

2.1  Educational factor In Ukraine, English language learning starts in primary school and continues through higher education. The Ukrainian system of education is rather new and does not comprise members of the generation who studied more than 16 years ago. Thus, the Soviet system of foreign languages education should also be taken into consideration. At that time, learning English as a foreign language usually started in the secondary school and continued at higher educational institutions. Without evaluating the Soviet system of English language instruction, one may expect that more than 10 years of even poor language learning may result



Chapter 18.  Language allergy 

in a level of English language proficiency that is sufficient for communication. Nevertheless, the figures presented earlier in this chapter show the opposite. 2.2  Motivational factor These figures may be explained by the lack of incentives, material in particular. The study of the motivation for learning languages in the European Union shows that the reasons for foreign language learning are becoming more and more tied to practical benefits, such as using the skills at work (32%), working abroad (27%), and getting a better job inside the country (23%) (Special Eurobarometer 2006: 5). The analysis of 50 randomly chosen employment ads (taken from www.alljob.com. ua), all offering a salary higher than $1,000, however, shows that 32 of them (about 65%) require a “good knowledge of English”. The examination of 50 randomly chosen resumes from the same Internet source demonstrates that only 14 (fewer than 30%) job-seekers meet this requirement, indicating “fluent English” in their CVs. If we compare the aforementioned salary with 1,475 uah (about $292), the official average wage in Ukraine in October 2007 (Average wages and salaries by region 2007), it triggers the question: is this not a sufficient motivation for learning English? This question is especially relevant taking into account the data compiled by the Ukrainian Institute of Social Studies and “Social Monitoring” Center. According to these data, 92% of Ukrainian youth give priority to “high level of payment” in their system of values (Levkovska 2006). 2.3  Economic factor Having mentioned that money may be a potential motivation for language learning, it may also be considered an obstacle one must accept to learn a language. To test this assumption, we gathered information about English group tuition fees in different language courses in Kyiv, with the result that the average monthly cost per person varies from 450 uah to 650 uah ($90–$130), the cost per hour being 18 uah-27 uah ($3.5–$5). It is remarkable that a 1.5–hour lesson of English in Kyiv costs less than a cinema ticket, priced 40 uah ($8), thus giving us the grounds to claim that the economic factor is not a sufficient reason for the lack of English language knowledge among Ukrainians. 2.4  Geopolitical factor Despite the fact that geographically Ukraine may be considered the center of Europe, politically this is by far not the case. In this respect, it is essential to mention that until 16 years ago (the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991), the borders of Ukraine, as of all the other Soviet Republics, were closed to Western influence, which resulted in the absence of an English language environment

 Mariya Sergeyeva & Anna Chesnokova

that would make the learning process faster and easier. Nonetheless, although the cultural influence of Western civilization (the United States in particular) on Ukraine has sky-rocketed since 1991, the level of English language knowledge has not developed at such a rate. 2.5  Emotional factor Much of the research of the last decades has concentrated on the role of emotion in learning (Christianson 1992), though researchers have different, often quite contradictory, opinions on this issue, with some of them claiming that “the memory advantage for highly affective material was the same for negative as for positive reactions to the material” (Bower 1992: 15), and others stating that it is only positive affect that has a powerful and facilitating effect on memory and learning (Isen 1999). Taking the aforementioned opinions into account, investigation of what emotions, if any, affect learning English in Ukraine seems reasonable. Can emotions enhance or hinder this process? Is it necessarily the case that positive emotions account for success in acquiring skills in English, and negative ones are to blame in failing to do so? Is there such a notion as “language allergy”? Is it “language allergy” that prevents Ukrainians from learning English? These questions cannot be answered without some awareness of the linguistic situation in Ukraine and its language policies during the 20th century.

3.  Linguistic situation in Ukraine: Historical background As the interest towards bilingualism and its impact on education in post-Soviet countries is growing (Batelaan 2002), we decided to take a closer look on the attitude to it in Ukraine. Since Ukraine became an independent state in 1991, Ukrainian has been the only official state language, though issues in bilingualism have always been on the political agenda (Kolesnikov 2003). One of the key slogans of a leading political party was the idea of introducing Russian as a second state language, which raised numerous discussions both during the last presidential and parliamentary elections (Preobrazhenskaya 2006). There were two controversial views on this issue. The opinion shared by the majority of the Western Ukraine population was that bilingualism would lead to another Russification of Ukraine, thus restricting the rights of the Ukrainian-speaking population in their own country (Slezko 2000; Shaizhin 2006; Podobed 2007). Another view ascribed mostly to the population of the Eastern Ukraine stated that bilingualism is essential for preserving the rights of those who consider Russian as their native language (Kotsina 2007).



Chapter 18.  Language allergy 

Before taking a closer look at the linguistic processes in Ukraine, the concepts of Ukrainization and Russification need to be clarified. While Russification is considered as a “forcible introduction of Russian language and culture” (Busel 2006: 1279), Ukrainization is believed to be the “introduction of Ukrainian language, culture, and traditions” (idem: 1502). Having stated above that bilingualism is a highly political issue, we shall not attribute either positive or negative assessment to either of the processes. Thus, as an inventory for the research, we will refer to Russification and Ukrainization as historical periods when secondary and higher education was mainly carried out in Russian or Ukrainian respectively. We shall present the data testifying to fast interchangeability of Ukrainization and Russification processes, which may have resulted in the rejection of the governmental language policy by the population of Ukraine. In 1958, only 21% of children studied in Ukrainian schools compared to 1926, when over 97% of high school students were obtaining their education in Ukrainian (Dzyuba 2005: 175). It is worthy of note that, before 1920s, when no statistical data were available, there were hardly any Ukrainian schools at all after the Ems Ukaz of 1876, which banned the Ukrainian language. In 1990–1991 the number of students using Ukrainian in higher educational institutions of Ukraine constituted only 7% (Ivanishin and RadevychVynnizkiy 1992: 128). This situation changed dramatically, however, after 1991 when the independence of Ukraine was proclaimed and Ukrainian was recognized as the only official state language. Consequently, during the first years of independence, the distribution of students by Ukrainian language of instruction was as follows: secondary educational institutions: 1991–92 –45%, 1995–96 –58%, 2004–05 –77%. In higher educational institutions of I and II level of accreditation there were 7% of students studying in Ukrainian in 1990–91. In 1995–96 these numbers soared to 55% and in 2005–06, to 85% (Statistical Yearbook of Ukraine 2004: 477; Statistical Yearbook of Ukraine 2007: 484). These figures illustrate the fact that over the first decade of independence the government transformed the system of secondary and higher education from partly to overwhelmingly Ukrainian. These essential, though abrupt, changes led to the charges of Ukrainization, put forward mostly by the Russian-speaking population.

4.  Hypothesis and methodology With such a long history of sudden changes in language policy taking place every 10–20 years, it is only natural to assume that there should be some kind of opposition from the population towards this policy. What remains to be proved, however, is whether this opposition, or “language allergy”, hinders learning other foreign languages, English in particular, through internal resistance towards learning.

 Mariya Sergeyeva & Anna Chesnokova

The current study investigates the possible impact of Russification and Ukrainization policies on the attitude of Ukrainians towards foreign, in particular English, language learning. The paper attempts to explore the degree of correlation, if any, between the experiences of being instructed in non-native language, Russian or Ukrainian, in secondary or higher educational institutions and English language learning. The hypothesis is that people who had negative experience with instruction in their non-native language are likely to experience the same reaction when learning another foreign language. To test this hypothesis, 96 participants responded to a questionnaire. They came from 3 regions: 31 from Kyiv, the bi-lingual capital, 36 from the Western, mostly Ukrainian-speaking region, and 29 from the Eastern, Russian-speaking region. Their ages ranged from 17 to 52 with a mean of 27.96. The choice of participants was random. The respondents filled in the questionnaires during their business activities in offices and during leisure activities in public places in a fully anonymous way. In the first part of the questionnaire, the respondents indicated their age, gender, occupation, native language, language of instruction at their secondary and higher education institutions. In addition, they stated whether they had ever learnt the English language and evaluated their knowledge of English. Whether these evaluations were subjective or objective did not affect the course of investigation, as it is the attitude towards English language learning and self-evaluation that were of prime importance for the research. In the second part of the questionnaire, the participants ranked their attitude towards being instructed in their non-native language, Russian or Ukrainian, with the help of the adjectives on a semantic differential scale. The terms on this scale were selected during the preparatory stage by means of free associations with “instruction in the non-native language” of 38 randomly chosen respondents. Six adjectives and their opposites were chosen as the most frequently mentioned: “easy/difficult”, “interesting/dull”, “exciting/boring”, “useful/useless”, “pleasant/unpleasant”, “optional/forced”. The respondents also evaluated their experiences with learning English or their opinion about learning English if they had not studied it. To do so, they used the adjectives also selected at the preparatory stage by means of free associations with “English language learning” of the same 38 randomly chosen participants. Six adjectives and their opposites were selected on the basis of both their frequency and their compliance with the previous set of adjectives: “easy/difficult”, “interesting/dull”, “exciting/boring”, “useful/useless”, “possible/impossible to learn”. It should be pointed out that though the pairs “interesting/dull” and “exciting /boring” are quite close in meaning, both of them were selected to serve the filter



Chapter 18.  Language allergy 

against the automatically-filled questionnaires. Thus, if the evaluations with the help of these pairs of adjectives contradicted each other, the questionnaire would be considered invalid. Finally, participants were divided into 3 groups according to their experience with non-native language instruction in secondary or higher educational institutions. The first group, named “native” and functioning as control group, included the respondents whose language instruction had been in their native language, and who therefore had not undergone any influence of non-native language instruction. The second group consisted of respondents who had had a positive experience with instruction in a non-native language. This group was named “non-native positive”. The third group, named “non-native negative” comprised respondents who had had negative experiences with instruction in a non-native language. 5.  Analysis and discussion For the quantitative analyses of the data, spss for Windows version 11.0 was used. anova was used for comparing the responses of the 3 groups of participants. Before moving on to the analysis of the results, the spread of respondents should be pointed out. As an example we will take the “pleasant/unpleasant” category:

non-native unpleasant

native

non-native pleasant

Graph 1.  Groups division according to “pleasant/unpleasant” experiences with non-native language instruction.

 Mariya Sergeyeva & Anna Chesnokova

As we can see from Graph 1, the group of respondents who had had unpleasant experiences with non-native language of instruction constitutes 33% of the respondents, which is enough to wield considerable influence on the overall picture of the attitude towards English language learning. If we consider the distribution of these 3 groups across the regions of Ukraine, we obtain quite remarkable results. Graph 2 shows that in all the regions of Ukraine the percentage of people who represent “native” or “control” group is virtually the same. That brings us to the conclusion that people who were not exposed to non-native language of instruction in their secondary or higher institutions are distributed equally across Ukraine. Thus, people who were exposed to a non-native language of instruction are also distributed equally across the country. However, the distribution of people who had positive and negative experiences with non-native language instruction, “non-native pleasant” and “non-native unpleasant” groups, respectively, differs considerably. In the first region, Kyiv, there are twice as many respondents who evaluate their experiences with non-native language positively than in the second, and especially the third,

60

50

Percent

40

non-nat lang pleasant

30

20

native non-native pleasant

10

non-native unpleasant 0

Kyiv

East West place of birth

Graph 2.  Groups distribution across Ukraine according to “pleasant/unpleasant” experiences with non-native language instruction.



Chapter 18.  Language allergy 

Eastern and Western regions respectively, where there are considerably more respondents who constitute the “non-native unpleasant” group. Though not highly significant (p = 0.056), these results trigger a few practical questions. Who are these people in the regions who consider their experience with non-native language of instruction negative? What makes Kyiv region’s system of education so different from other Western and Eastern regions that results in considerably higher percentage of respondents having positive experiences with nonnative language instruction? The answer to these questions may serve as one of the instruments in facilitating English language learning in Ukraine, due to the fact that highly significant correlations between the experiences of being instructed in non-native language and of English language learning were found. As we can see from Graph 3,2 the evaluation of English language learning by “native” or control group differs substantially from that of the “non-native unpleasant” group that has much lower percentage of respondents who give positive evaluations of English language learning and higher percentage of those who give 50

40

Percent

30 non-nat lang pleasant 20 native 10

0

non-native pleasant non-native unpleasant

Graph 3.  Distribution of respondents in “pleasant/unpleasant” category of non-native language of instruction and English language learning.

2.  The horizontal line at the bottom of Graphs 3 to 6 moves from positive to negative, indicating a scale from “very+, a bit+, neither/nor, a bit–, very –”.

 Mariya Sergeyeva & Anna Chesnokova

negative evaluations than the control group (p = .000). There is a clear trend of the “non-native unpleasant” group to give indifferent evaluation (“neither pleasant nor unpleasant”) to English language learning. The same results, also highly significant (p = 0.002), can be traced while examining the correlation between the experiences in a non-native language of instruction in the category “unforced/forced”, and the “pleasant/unpleasant” category of English language learning (Graph 4).

50

40

Percent

30 non-nat lang forced 20 native 10

non-native unforced non-native forced

0 Graph 4.  Distribution of respondents in “unforced/forced” category of non-native language of instruction and “pleasant/unpleasant” category of English language learning.

It is clearly seen that respondents who consider their non-native language of instruction as “forced” tend to evaluate English language learning as “pleasant” less frequently and as “unpleasant” more frequently than the control group, again giving preference to indifferent evaluation. Yet, quite unexpected results were produced by examining the correlation between the experiences in a non-native language of instruction in the category “unforced/forced” and “interesting/dull” (p = 0.003) (see Graph 5).



Chapter 18.  Language allergy  70 60

Percent

50 40 non-nat lang forced 30 20 10 0

native non-native unforced non-native forced

Graph 5.  Distribution of respondents in “unforced/forced” category of non-native language of instruction and “interesting/dull” category of English language learning.

The same result can also be seen between the experiences with a non-native language of instruction in the category “pleasant/unpleasant” and “interesting/dull” (p = 000) (see Graph 6). 80

Percent

60

40

non-nat lang pleasant native

20

non-native pleasant non-native unpleasant

0 Graph 6.  Distribution of respondents in “pleasant/unpleasant” category of non-native language of instruction and “interesting/dull” category of English language learning.

 Mariya Sergeyeva & Anna Chesnokova

The trends between the control group and the “non-native forced” group (Graph 5), which is the group of respondents who consider their non-native language of instruction as forced upon them, as well as the control group and the “non-native unpleasant” group (Graph 6), confirm the tendencies shown in Graphs 3 and 4. It is worthy of note, though, that both the “non-native forced” group and the “non-native unpleasant” group almost do not give indifferent evaluation of English language learning in “interesting/dull” category as opposed to Graphs 3 and 4, where indifferent evaluation is far more frequent. What is even more remarkable, however, is that the percentage of respondents from the “nonnative unforced” and “non-native pleasant” groups that evaluate their experience in English language learning as “interesting” is higher than that of the control group.

6.  Conclusions Having considered all the categories, we can conclude that the hypothesis was confirmed in the following cases: ■ ■

■

■

respondents who had unpleasant experiences with non-native language of instruction tend to have unpleasant experiences with English language learning; participants who consider that non-native language of instruction was forced upon them have a greater tendency to evaluate learning English as unpleasant than other groups (control and “non-native pleasant”); those who believe that they were forced into studying in their non-native language evaluated English language learning as dull more frequently than other two groups; the same trend is preserved with respondents who had unpleasant experience with being instructed in non-native language – they also state that learning English is dull as opposed to control and “non-native pleasant” groups.

Taking into consideration the results obtained from examining the aforementioned categories, we may infer that Ukrainians tend to evaluate English language learning as something interesting, but not very pleasant. Thus, as regards the question of whether Ukrainians have “language allergy”, no definite answer can be given, despite the high level of correlation between some experiences of being instructed in non-native language in secondary or higher educational institutions and English language learning. The results of the present study may serve as a basis for further research on the methods used for the teaching of English in Ukraine.



Chapter 18.  Language allergy 

References Average wages and salaries by region (monthly information). 2007. Retrieved November 16, 2007, from http://www.ukrstat.gov.ua/ Batelaan, P. 2002. Bilingual education: The case of Latvia from a comparative perspective. Intercultural Education 13(4): 355–374. Bower, G. 1992. How might emotions affect learning? In The Handbook of Emotion and Memory: Research and Theory, S.A. Christianson (ed.), 3–31. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Busel, V. (ed.). 2006. Great Explanatory Dictionary of Ukrainian Language. Kyiv: Perun. Christianson, S.A. (ed.). 1992. The Handbook of Emotion and Memory: Research and Theory. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Dzyuba, I. 2005. Internationalism or Russification. Kyiv: Kyiv Mohyla Academy. European Commission. 2001. Special Eurobarometer Survey 54. European Commission. 2006. Special Eurobarometer Survey 243/Wave 64.3 – TNS Opinion and Social. Isen, A.M. 1999. Positive affect. In The Handbook of Cognition and Emotion, T. Dalgleish & M.J. Power (eds), 521–539. New York NY: Wiley. Ivanishin, V. & Radevych-Vynnizkiy, Y. 1992. Language and Nation. Drogobych: Vidrodzhennya. Kolesnikov, V. 2003. Pereyaslav. Weekly 2000 34(184). Retrieved January 3, 2008, from http:// news2000.org.ua/print?a=%2Fpaper%2F24759 Kotsina, I. 2007. Sergey Taruta: Russian should be taught at schools not as a foreign language but on a par with Ukrainian. Facts 292: 3. Levkovska, N. 2006. Values dynamics of youth. Political Management 1(16): 85–93. Magochiy, P. 2007. History of Ukraine. Kyiv: Krytyka. Podobed, K. 2007. Opinion: Matter of time. Korrespondent 49. Retrieved January 3, 2008, from http://korrespondent.net/opinions/323227 Preobrazhenskaya, A. 2006. Russian is legalized. Retrieved November 24, 2007, from http:// www.partyofregions.org.ua/contrprop/resonance/444f3980d4979/ Shaizhin, A. 2006. Ukrainization a-la Valuev. Weekly 2000 26(324). Retrieved January 3, 2008, from http://news2000.org.ua/print?a=%2Fpaper%2F5478 Slezko, V. 2000. I would to another country like this... Kyivsky Telegraph 29. Retrieved January 3, 2008, from http://www.k-telegraph.kiev.ua/N29 Statistical Yearbook of Ukraine for 2003. 2004. State Committee of Statistics. Kyiv: Consultant. Statistical Yearbook of Ukraine for 2006. 2007. State Committee of Statistics. Kyiv: Consultant.

chapter 19

Proper names in the translation of The Lord of the Rings Vladimir Yepishev The Lord of the Rings is a multilingual trilogy which includes texts and lexical units of eight languages that are represented by means of the Roman alphabet and diacritics. This study scrutinizes the problem with translations of proper names. This includes an analysis of Tolkien’s languages and their phonetic system. The results obtained embrace sound value of graphemes as well as pronunciation rules and are used to compare proper names in the original with interpretations by Ukrainian and Russian translators, raising the question of phonetic correspondence in translation. The novel suffered much in translations because of various alternations and substitutions. Many proper names were misunderstood and therefore rendered incorrectly. Keywords:  Sindarin, Quenya, Rohirric, Khuzdûl, translation, transliteration

1.  Introduction The Lord of the Rings first reached the Russian reader in translations of Z. Bobyr’ and A. Gruzberg. Now there exist eleven Russian and three Ukrainian translations of the novel. Despite the impressive number of attempts to translate the trilogy made by both professional and amateur translators, the target text remains an adventure story only. Its linguistic features, such as Celtic-sounding of Sindarin are not preserved. The phonetics of the artificial languages, which were created by the author, undergo serious alternations, such as termination of diphthongs, sound substitution, consonant insertions, palatalization, etc. Consonantal and vowel changes upset the link between Tolkien’s transliteration and the graphic systems of Tengwar and Cirth, which he invented for his languages. For instance, according to these systems, d, t, dh and th should

 Vladimir Yepishev

be represented by four different letters, which is hardly possible in the target text in Ukrainian or Russian. This makes Appendix E of The Lord of the Rings useless, as it describes things which are lost in translation. The Celtic-sounding Sindarin also serves the purpose of an intertextual link between the novel and Welsh stories of elves and fairies. Some of Sindarin words were originally taken by the author from the Welsh language, such as Sindarin duin “river” – dwyn “to carry”, Sindarin lin “pond” – llyn “lake”, etc. (Kist 2005). 2.  The world of the novel The action of The Lord of the Rings takes place in an imaginary world of J.R.R. Tolkien, Middle-earth (derived from Old English Middangeard, as the professor commented in his letter to the New York Times: “Middle English midden-erd (or erthe), altered from Old English Middangeard, the name for the inhabited lands of Men “between the seas” . . .”). This is an “alternative” history of our world, where with men lived creatures that have long ago became myths: elves, orcs, trolls, ents, hobbits and many other beings. Middle-earth’s inhabitants have various languages and writing systems. Even birds and animals use languages. In The Hobbit (which is a preamble to The Lord of the Rings) the wargs were said to use a language of their own for communication (Tolkien 1974: 111). So were the eagles of the Misty Mountains and some birds that dwelled near the Lonely Mountain (Tolkien 1974: 118). The thrushes knew the language of Dale, which differed from The Common Speech so much, that the dwarves could not understand a word of it (Tolkien 1974: 268). Also the ravens were known to live long and master many languages (Tolkien 1974: 268). Even the stones of Middle-earth possessed a gift of speech, and the elves could hear them (Tolkien 1974: 301). Thus Middle-earth appeared before us as a world filled with magic, a world where the tale was alive and where the myths were reality. A fairy world, indeed. 3.  Languages of the novel The novel encapsulates texts and lexical units of several languages, some of which are artificial languages created by the author himself. Among these are the languages of elves, dwarfs and orcs. The dominating language of the novel is Westron, which is said to have been completely substituted by the English language. The author plays the part of a reteller and a translator at the same time, rendering the story into English and finding a way to represent songs, poems and words, which are not of Westron origin. J.R.R. Tolkien did not want to flatten his



Chapter 19.  Proper names in the translation of The Lord of the Rings 

novel to English, and so he had to use new consonants, write pronunciation guides and write separate appendixes on “alien” languages. It must be mentioned that the novel is hard for the English reader, since some of the artificial languages have confusing consonants and vowels as well as unusual stress rules and diphthongs. What follows is a more precise analysis of the differences between languages. 3.1  Quenya Quenya – the language of the high elves, language of lore, an equivalent of Latin. It has five vowels: [a], [6], [i], [f], [u], represented by a, e, i, o and u correspondently. Quenya has fifteen consonants: [f], [g], [h], [j], [k], [l], [m], [n], [ŋ], [p], [r], [s], [t], [v], [w]. In Appendix E to The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien explains how to read words in elven origin, which he transcribed (Tolkien 1974: 946). It is interesting to know that the vowel system of Quenya resembles more the systems of Italian and Spanish (and even Ukrainian) than that of English. Quenya vowels are to be pronounced clearly, and often Tolkien would resort to putting diacresis over vowels to make English readers read them properly, or marking the dissyllabic pairs of vowels, for instance: Eressëa [6'r6s6"], Manwё ['m"nw6]. Besides short vowels, Quenya has long [a:], [6:], [i:], [f:], [u:], which Tolkien marks in his book with acute accent: á, é, í, ó and ú (Tolkien 1974: 946). Not all consonants in transliterated elven words preserve the phonetic value, which they have in the English language: some of them deserve a separate description; these are: c, h, f, k, ng, qu, r, s, th (Tolkien 1974: 948). The pronunciation of these vowels is scrutinized in Table 1. Table 1.  Quenya-English transliteration and pronunciation Transliteration

Pronunciation

c In all elven words consonant c has a value of [k], and never of [s], as in some English words, like celedon, cell, etc. f Denotes [f] sound everywhere except at the end of words, where it is read as [v]. h Alone stands for English sound of [h]. k Same as c, but occurs only to denote words of non-elven origin, i.e., it can be observed in transliteration of Dwarvish words and that of the Black Speech. ng Stays for the [ŋg] sound, as in English words finger, linger, etc. qu Representation of [kw], as in English question. r In elven words represents trilled [r] in all positions, though in Dwarvish and the Black Speech it could stand for back or uvular r. s Voiceless English [s] in all positions. th In Quenya th has the value of [s].

 Vladimir Yepishev

Double consonants in alien words represent either “double” or long consonants. Quenya has six diphthongs: ai, oi, ui and au, eu, iu. All these diphthongs belong to falling diphthongs and are intended to be pronounced respectively as [ai], [fi], [ui], [aʊ], [eu] and [iu] (Tolkien 1974: 949). 3.2  Sindarin The language of the Grey-elves includes five vowels (same as Quenya) plus a semi-vowel y, which indicates a sound of front German [y], as in the word Mücke (Tolkien 1974: 947). Long vowels in Sindarin transliteration are marked with acute accent or a circumflex, if a vowel stands in stressed monosyllables (Tolkien 1974: 947). The diphthongs are: ae, oi, ei, oe, ui, and au. Sometimes in accordance with the English custom the author uses aw instead of au at the end of words. The rules of diphthong pronunciation are the same as in Quenya. It is important to know that the vowel i standing in the beginning of the word before another vowel acquires the value of [j], as in the English word you, becoming a consonant. Concerning the consonants, Sindarin possesses several that do not occur in Quenya’s transliteration. These are: ch/kh, dh, gh, lh, ph, rh. Moreover, th consonant in Sindarin has the value of [θ]. Thus both elven languages possess the same grapheme, which has different phonetic meanings. In Sindarin, ng in the initial position denotes [ŋ] sound, as in the English word wing. Lh and rh represent voiceless l and r; gh is “back spirant” in the Black Speech. Some researchers believe lh denotes Welsh sound [S], though this theory is against the Appendix E of the novel. Some Sindarin consonants are given in Table 2 along with their pronunciation guides. Note that the table describes only those consonants that do not occur in Quenya’s. 3.3  Rohirric The language of Rohirrim had much in common with Anglo-Saxon (which is Old English). Anglo-Saxons became the prototype for Rohirrim, and their language inspired Rohirric, which led to Anglo-Saxons lexical units in Rohirric. No definite rules for pronunciation of Anglo-Saxon have been established, since it varied much across Britain, and also because scholars have not yet agreed about the pronunciation themselves. Table 2.  Sindarin-English transliteration and pronunciation Transliteration

Pronunciation

ch/kh dh ph

Stands for [x] as in the German word Chemie. Denotes English sound of [ð]. Marks the [f] sound.



Chapter 19.  Proper names in the translation of The Lord of the Rings 

The language contained seven vowels: a, æ, e, i, o, u, y. Unlike modern English, y in Anglo-Saxon was always a vowel. The general pronunciation rules for vowels have been similar to the rules of most European languages, still different from Modern English (Allan 2006). The approximate phonetic values of the AngloSaxon vowels are given in Table 3. Table 3.  Anglo-Saxon vowels pronunciation a e é i í o ó u ú æ y

[a:] [e] [ei] [i] [i:] [f] [6~] [u] [u:] [æ] [y]

Besides monophones there were six diphthongs in Anglo-Saxon: ea, éa, eo, éo, ie, and íe (Allan 2006). Most of the consonants sounded the same as in Modern English, but those that differed (Allan 2006) are given in Table 4. Table 4.  Anglo-Saxon consonants pronunciation Letter

Position

Pronunciation

f

at the start or the end of word in the middle of word beside unvoiced consonant doubled

[f] [v] [f] [f]

s

at the start or the end of word in the middle of word beside unvoiced consonant doubled

[s] [z] [s] [s]

sc

usually

[w]

þ or ð

at the start or the end of word in the middle of word beside unvoiced consonant doubled

[θ] [ð] [θ] [θ]

h

at the start or the end of word in the middle of word

[h] [x]

c

in general before e, before i, after i

[k] [tw]

 Vladimir Yepishev g

in general before e, before i, after i in the middle of word

[g] [j] [>]

cg

[dŠ]

ng

[ŋg]

The letters þ and ð were interchangeable. Doubled letters denoted longer sounds, as in Italian and Finnish. All letters were pronounced. Note that some sources give different information on Old English pronunciation rules, for instance è is suggested to be pronounced as [æ]. Again according to other sources ch is supposed to have had the value of [kh] and sc is [sk] (Stoudenets’ 1998: 35), while the vales of [tw] and [w] are attributed to the Middle English period (Stoudenets’ 1998: 30). 3.4  The Black Speech This is the speech of Sauron’s servants. Any empire needs an official language, and the Black Speech became the official language of the domain of Mordor – the land ruled by Sauron. It possesses the plosives b, g, d, p, t, k, the spirants th, gh (and possibly f and kh, attested in Orc-names only), the lateral l, the vibrant r, the nasals m, n, and the sibilants s, z, sh (Fauskanger 1999). Due to lack of information on the Black Speech, this list might not be full. There seem to be only four vowels in the speech of Sauron’s servants, which are a, i, o, u; note that o is stated by Tolkien to be rare. Long vowels are attested, as in Sindarin transliteration (Tolkien 1974: 950). Sadly, J.R.R. Tolkien did not leave much information on the Black Speech of Mordor and its pronunciation. Orcs were said to adopt foreign languages and change them to their own liking, but they created brutal jargons, insufficient even for their own small needs (Tolkien 1974: 937). Orcs had many dialects, and sometimes the difference between them was so great that members of one tribe could not use their language for inter-tribal communication. 3.5  Khuzdûl Khuzdûl is a secret language of the dwarven race. Not much can be said about it, and not much is known about it. Digging through all books on Middle-earth, only a few words of genuine Dwarvish can be found. However, there are some points which are to be highlighted: unlike in transliterated words of elven origin, aspirated th and kh do not represent a single sound of [θ] or [x], but [th] and [kh] respectively, as in the English words backhand and outhouse (Tolkien 1974: 937).



Chapter 19.  Proper names in the translation of The Lord of the Rings 

4.  Transcribing into Ukrainian: Problems and solutions Transcription into Ukrainian is easier than into English, for Ukrainian possesses more means for rendering sounds than the English language. Nevertheless, there are some issues: representing the [h] sound, rendering [ŋ] sound, [ð] and [θ] sounds transfer. Traditionally translators prefer transcription of elven words instead of their transliteration. Unfortunately, the Ukrainian language has no consonants to denote [ŋ], [ð] and [θ] sounds, so translators have been forced to follow the tradition of substituting them with other letters that have different phonetic values (Korunets’ 2001: 92–93). This substitution however, may often lead to serious misunderstandings. For instance, there are two words: Tauron and Thauron, which will be both rendered as Таурон [tauron] (since voiceless th is often substituted with t by Ukrainian translators), unless they both occur in the text. The problem is that these two names belong to two different characters, who are mortal enemies: a protagonist Tauron, whose name is formed from taur, which means “forest” and Thauron, whose name comes from thaur – “abominable, abhorrent”. In translations with substitutions they will merge into a single person, and if the first one is a forester and the second one is abhorrent, then together they form someone who is an “abhorrester”. One of the possible ways out might be lo leave all non-English words as they are given in the text – a method implied in translating into Ukrainian The Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak in 1980s. The novel was written by a famous Flemmish writer Ch. De Coster. It was written in French but contained many Dutch words which were represented in their original form. When in the 1980s an attempt to translate the book into Ukrainian was made, a translator from the French language faced the baffling task of rendering words he could hardly comprehend. Luckily the book had a glossary made by the author in which he provided a descriptive translation of the Dutch words into French. The solution was the following: the translator rendered all French units and left all the Dutch words unaltered, as they were in the original. Thus he received a text containing Ukrainian and Dutch with a Dutch-Ukrainian glossary.

5.  Alternations in proper names rendering Names prove to be the most confusing for translators to convey. One difficulty is caused by J.R.R. Tolkien’s use of consonants and characters, which do not occur in English (dh, lh); as another by his combinations of characters and letters that are valued differently from the English (c, ch). To support the argument, several

 Vladimir Yepishev

elven names are presented in their original transliteration by J.R.R. Tolkien and translations made by Ukrainian and Russian translators. All phonetic shifts in the translation of proper names can be classified into two major groups: alternations made accidentally and those made deliberately. To the accidental group belong proper names in so called “underground” translations. Despite the fact that Tolkien’s novel was translated in the late 70s, it was not published officially. The Lord of the Rings was considered to be an antiSoviet novel. Maybe Tolkien had not intended it to be so, but the Soviet editors did not publish his novel. Yet the translations were not burned, and they spread: written by hand and told by mouth, the tale of the Ring traveled across the ussr. Naturally the first translators of The Lord of the Rings had no access to other Tolkien’s books and articles about the languages of the novel. Thus the distortion of proper names in first translations of the trilogy is justified by translators’ unawareness of the multilinguality of the novel. The deliberate distortions and alternations took place in other translations that followed. They are not owing to mistakes of young translators, but to the actions chosen by venerable authorities. All deliberate and accidental alternations can be subdivided into the following subgroups: ☐ alternations caused by translator’s unawareness of the text’s multilinguality; ☐ distortions resulting from the translator’s will to drop certain sounds and substitute them; ☐ alternations caused by the will to assimilate proper names to the language of translation; ☐ alternations made when the word is considered to be rude; ☐ distortions by translation of what should remain unchanged; ☐ transliteration of proper names which should be translated; 5.1  Distortions in proper names transcription Unfortunately distortions in the transcription of proper names are the most frequent and no translation of the novel has ever been made without a certain phonological twist of names. Examples of this kind of misunderstanding are found even in the most up-to-date Ukrainian translation by O. Feshovets’, which is said to have been performed following the author’s note on pronunciation. 5.1.1  Lúthien ['lu:θi6n] This is an elven name of Sindarin origin, therefore th here represents unvoiced interdental fricative [θ]. A rough conveying of this name would be Лутіен for Ukrainian and Лутиэн for Russian. Table 5 provides variants given by translators. It is interesting to note that some of the distortions are the result of “free translation”. Lúthien was very beautiful and maybe this was the reason why N. Grigorieva

Chapter 19.  Proper names in the translation of The Lord of the Rings 



Table 5.  Lúthien transcription into Cyrillic Variant

Translator/s From English into Russian

Лучиэнь [Álutwi6nj] Лютиен [Áljutij6n] Лютиэн [Áljuti6n] Лютиэнь [Áljutij6nj]

N. Grigorieva and V. Grushetskii Z. Bobyr’ A. Gruzberg V. Volkovskii, D. Afinogenov and V. Tikhomirov A. Kistiakovskii and V. Muraviov

From English into Ukrainian Лючіень А. Nemirova [Áljutwi7nj]

and V. Grushetskii gave her a new name, which contains the stem of Russian word “луч”, (a ray). It can be also assumed that translations containing “лют” might be attributed somehow to the name of a flower in Russian: “лютик” (a buttercup). Substituting interdental [θ] with other consonants ([t], [s] or [f]) became a tradition in transliteration (Korunets’ 2001: 98). Indeed Ukrainian and Russian do not possess a grapheme for this voiceless dental fricative: fita is used no more. The question is whether such a transformation is a distortion, and the answer is affirmative. 5.1.2  Grishnákh [Ágriwna:x] This is the name of the orc commander, who was sent from Mordor with troops to seize the Ringbearer. The name is of the Black Speech origin. As we can see from the name Grishnákh, it contains sh sound, which does not occur in elven languages and might sound ill to elves; in addition, we may assume that the vowel i could be pronounced in a different way, for instance, as Ukrainian и, which would probably grate upon the elven ears as well. Orcs often growled and grunted, and it is more likely that they preferred back vowels (to which Ukrainian и belongs) instead of the front ones. Note that kh denotes a single sound of [x]. According to the sounding of the name, its faithful translation into Ukrainian is Ґришнах. In Ukrainian and Russian translations it has been rendered as it is shown in Table 6. The cardinal error is the lack of either k or x sound in the target language variants. A. Nemirova’s variant of the name contains the o sound, which is known to be extremely rare in the Black Speech: there are only few words that contain the sound o in the orcs’ speech (Fauskanger 1999).

 Vladimir Yepishev

Table 6.  Grishnákh transcription into Cyrillic Variant

Translator/s

From English into Russian

Горшнак [gfrwnak] Гришнак [griwnak] Гришнакх [griwnakx] Грышнак [grGwnak]

A. Nemirova N. Grigorieva and V. Grushetskii Z. Bobyr’ V. Volkovskii, D. Afinogenov and V. Tihomirov A. Kistiakovskii and V. Muravyov

From English into Ukrainian Горшнак A. Nemirova [Bfrwnak]

5.1.3  Lugbúrz [Álugbu:rz] This was the name of Barad-dûr, the tower of Sauron, in the language of orcs. It is not a difficult name to render. The right transcription of it would be Лугбурз [Álugburz] for Russian and Луґбурз [Álugburz] for Ukrainian. Somehow it seems unsuitable for the translators, as Table 7 shows. As it is seen from the table above, some translators perceive the Black Speech as German, and some choose to invent their own variants for the word instead of transcribing it. Table 7.  Lugbúrz transcription into Cyrillic Variant

Translator/s From English into Russian

Лугбурц [lugburu] Лагбур [lagbur] Лугбур [lugbur]

A. Gruzberg A. Nemirova N. Grigorieva and V. Grushetskii V.A. Matorina

From English Into Ukrainian Горбурц A. Nemirova [gorburu] O. Feshovets’ Луґбурц [lugburu]

Chapter 19.  Proper names in the translation of The Lord of the Rings 



5.1.4  Eowyn [ejfwyn] “Thus Aragorn for the first time in the full light of day beheld Éowyn, Lady of Rohan, and thought her fair, fair and cold, like a morning of pale spring that is not yet come (Tolkien 1974: 720). to womanhood” Aragorn saw Éowyn, the niece of Théoden, king of Rohan. The language of Rohan was Rohirric, though the Men of the Mark spoke the common language as well. As it was mentioned above, Rohirric was inspired by Anglo-Saxon, which J.R.R. Tolkien knew well. The usage of Anglo-Saxon words in Rohirric proves the application of the same pronunciation rules as the Anglo-Saxon language: é represents a sound as in the English word bay; while y denotes that of German für. Guided by these rules, a translator would render the name as Ейовюн into Ukrainian. Russian and Ukrainian variants of this name can be found in Table 8. There are also such variations as Эйовин [6jovin] and Эовейн [6ov6jn], unfortunately erroneous as well. O. Feshovets’ and A. Nemirova changed this name in their translations to Éowyn Еовіна [7f‚ina].

6.  Conclusion Sadly all the multilinguality of The Lord of the Rings gets flattened in the process of translation. Comprised of several languages with separate phonology and writing systems, the novel loses some of its linguistic features. Ukrainian and Russian readers do not receive the enchanting Celtic sounds of Quenya or Sindarin, they do not feel the difference between the language of dwarfs and the harsh languages of orcs. All sound the same, being limited to the phonetics of the target language. Table 8.  Éowyn transcription into Cyrillic Variant

Translator/s

From English into Russian

Йовин [jovin] Эовин [6ovin]

N. Grigorieva and V. Grushetskii Z. Bobyr’ A. Kistiakovskii and V. Muraviov

From English Into Ukrainian Еовіна A. Nemirova O. Feshovets’ [7f‚ina]

 Vladimir Yepishev

Sound substitution leads to character distortion. The names of characters influence the way we perceive them: when names are changed, the perception is changed: Old Norse Þórr does sound like a roll of thunder, while Russian variant [tor] is just a word with a dim meaning.

References Allan, S. 2006. Pronunciation of Old English. Retrieved November 30, 2007, from http://www. beowulftranslations.net/pronunciation.shtml Fauskanger, H.K. 1999. Orkish and the Black Speech. Retrieved November 30, 2007, from http:// www.uib.no/people/hnohf/orkish.htm Kist, O. 2005. Elves, Sindarin and Quenya. Retrieved January 9, 2008, from http://www.tolkienics. com/tolkien/sindarin.htm Korunets’, І.V. 2001. Theory and Practice of Translation. Vinnytsia: Nova Knyha. Lobdell, J.C. 2003. A Tolkien Compass. Chicago IL: Open Court Books. Stoudenets’, G.I. 1998. The History of the English Language in Tables. Kyiv: KSLU. Tolkien, C. & Tolkien, J.R.R. 2000. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. New York NY: Houghton Mifflin. Tolkien, J.R.R. 1964. Tree and Leaf. London: Unwin Books. Tolkien, J.R.R. 1974. The Hobbit (Collector’s Edition). Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin. Tolkien, J.R.R. 1974. The Lord of the Rings (Collector’s Edition). Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin. Tyler, J.E.A. 2004. The Complete Tolkien Companion. New York NY: Thomas Dunne Books.

chapter 20

Threat and geographical distance The case of north Korea Jan Prasil, Maria Dudusova & Jan Auracher North Korea is considered by westerners to be a dangerous and unpredictable country and its leader, Kim Jong II, a mad dictator. After its nuclear test in October 2006, nervousness reached a new critical point. Yet first impressions gathered after this test showed that perceptions of this “rogue state” range widely among observers in the West and their Asian counterparts. The present research specifically assesses the fear of subjects from four countries, when confronted with the official press release after the event. Our hypotheses were that the perceived fear of North Korea would differ between subject groups of each country, and that it would increase in correlation to geographical distance. The results confirm the first hypothesis. The second, however, could not be verified. Keywords:  perception, fear, credibility, enemy, nuclear test, North Korea, geographical distance

1.  Political background of the research – what happened before? The time when the northern regions of Korea were referred to as “The Land of the Morning Calm” is long over. For more than fifty years the United States has been at loggerheads with The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Under George W. Bush’s term these political interferences intensified. In 2002 North Korea was placed in the “axis of evil”, and the country was attacked verbally. For example, Colin Powell, the U.S. Secretary of State, described it as “a dark, cold and hungry hell” (Sommer 2003). In this context, U.S. administration rhetoric started to use the term “rogue state”. Both the country and its dictator matched the classical concept of an enemy. That a war of aggression could be launched by North Korea against Seoul or Tokyo, and carried out with weapons of mass destruction without regard for its

 Jan Prasil, Maria Dudusova & Jan Auracher

own losses, was consequently considered entirely possible in the Western world. On the other hand, the fear of a potential attack was mutual. Ri Chan Bok, General of the People’s Army, declared that North Koreans were ready to defend themselves anytime (Rather 2006). These words were repeated again when North Korea claimed to have successfully tested a nuclear bomb on October 9, 2006. For one whole week there were speculations around the world about the truthfulness of the nuclear test. The media asked: “Was it really a bomb?” The October 10 issue of the German newspaper ‘Die Welt’, for example, published critical comments from experts, who asked whether the detonation stemmed from tnt (Bodderas 2006). Given the weakness of the test, nobody was sure if it was a conventional or indeed a nuclear explosion. “More likely, scientists say, the test did not take place” (Spiller 2006). Nevertheless, many US media presented the test as a fact already on October 9: “North Korea (…) successfully tested a nuclear bomb this morning at a site near the city of Kilju” (Powell 2006a). On October 16, the U.S. Government confirmed that the test was indeed nuclear. Though doubts about the truthfulness of North Korea’s nuclear claims remained, the public reaction resulted in a state close of hysteria. The international community then confirmed its suspicion that the “rogue state” was indeed a dangerous nuclear threat, thereby legitimating the international sanctions against it. At this time, nervousness in the USA reached a new critical point. Newspapers issued headlines such as “When Outlaws Get The Bomb” (Powell 2006b), “A Nuclear Nightmare Comes True” (Powell 2006a), “The Axis Bomb” (New York Sun 2006). Also in other countries mass media created a picture of a serious threat. In Germany, the perception of North Korean borders changed and became very near, offering a geographical risk: “Very close to North Korea […] An unscrupulous country, that has nuclear weapons and needs money, exists in times in which the Islamic terrorists want to bring the greatest possible damage over the West, even not on the other side of the world, but just around the corner.” (Mayntz 2006) In Japan, the Prime Minister described the nuclear weapons testing as a “serious threat [that] would transform in a major way the security environment of North East Asia.” (Pilling 2006a). Yukio Okamoto, a security expert and a former special adviser on foreign policy to Junichiro Koizumi, Mr Abe’s predecessor, said: “In Japan, because of this threat, which people are feeling for the first time in the post-war period, there is going to be a massive outcry to beef up Japan’s security.” (Pilling 2006b)

2.  The research plan Given this situation, we wanted to determine the extent to which the perception of this threat differed between individuals of different cultural backgrounds.



Chapter 20.  Threat and geographical distance 

To this end we surveyed subjects from four different countries, Japan, Poland, Germany, and the USA, about their fear of the “North Korean bomb”. The aim of the research was to test whether geographical distance affects the degree of perceived danger. We believed that cultural and historical proximity exerts an influence on the way information about countries is processed. Accordingly, it was assumed that the North Korean regime would be perceived in the light of the experience of the respondents. That is, we hypothesized that the lack of information in countries situated at the greatest geographical distance (Germany, Poland, the USA) would be likely to cause a feeling of uncertainty with respect to North Korea. Living in the neighborhood to North Korea, the average Japanese has rather different experiences from people in Europe or North America. For one, Japan has quite a lot of North Korean immigrants, which enables Japanese to get information first hand. Moreover, in Japanese media people regularly can read about incidents with North Korea, for example when smugglers try to bring false money over the Japanese Sea or when North Korea launches missiles towards Japan. Despite this daily awareness of the actual relation with North Korea, Japan shares a history of more than a thousand years with its neighbor. Japanese grow up with stories and images that are passed on within their society. The situation in North America and in Europe is certainly quite different. People there get less information and mostly from actual issues in mass media. The average European or North American usually hears from North Korea only in the context of press releases such as those quoted above. The level of information in the three tested areas, hence, is completely different. Therefore, we assumed subjects from neighboring countries would assess the danger coming from North Korea in the light of their experience less emotionally than subjects from distant countries. Thus, our hypotheses were the following: 1.  Subjects from different countries present different levels of fear. 2.  Fear increases in correlation to geographical distance.

3.  Materials The following document was selected to test the differences in perception between the three western countries and Japan. The document was an official statement of North Korea’s government. Pyongyang, October 9 (kcna) – The Korean Central News Agency released the following report: The field of scientific research in the dprk successfully conducted an underground nuclear test under secure conditions on October 9, Juche 95 (2006) at a stirring time when all the people of the country are making a great leap forward in the building of a great prosperous powerful socialist nation.

 Jan Prasil, Maria Dudusova & Jan Auracher

It has been confirmed that there was no such danger as radioactive emission in the course of the nuclear test as it was carried out under a scientific consideration and careful calculation. The nuclear test was conducted with indigenous wisdom and technology 100 percent. It marks a historic event as it greatly encouraged and pleased the kpa and people that have wished to have powerful self-reliant defense capability. It will contribute to defending the peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and in the area around it. (Official press release of the Korean Central News Agency)

To test our hypotheses (see Section 2), 98 participants from four countries, of three different geographical regions (Japan – East Asia, Germany and Poland – Europe, and the USA – North America) were invited to participate. All participants were citizens in their countries and received the text in their mother language. We used the translations that were published in the national media. Subjects were asked to read the statement carefully and respond to a questionnaire. The questionnaire consisted of six statements, which were to be assessed on a 7-point Likert scale according to the subject’s approval (1 = “not at all” to 7 = “completely”). The statements referred to two dimensions concerning, on the one hand, the perceived threat of North Korea’s nuclear technology and, on the other hand, the credibility of North Korean regime. Each dimension (credibility and fear) included three statements, which had to be assessed separately.

Credibility: How safe do you consider Korea’s nuclear technology to be? How likely do you think it is that North Korea can afford to develop nuclear program? Would you describe North Korea as a country with the fifth biggest army, as a superpower?

Fear: North Korea is striving for the hegemony in the region. How likely do you think that is? North Korea will use its nuclear capability for hostile purposes. To what extent do you agree? Do you feel threatened by North Korea?

.  KCNA: http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2006/200610/news10/10.htm



Chapter 20.  Threat and geographical distance 

4.  Subjects Most of the 98 participants were university students of various educational institutions, mainly social studies students aged 19 to 27. As regards gender, 59 of them were female and 39 male. In relation to nationality, 25 subjects were from Germany, 21 from the USA, 19 from Poland and 33 from Japan. Table 1.  Subjects by nationality, gender and age Nationality Germany USA Poland Japan

Female

Male

Average age

14 11 11 23

11 10 8 10

27 22 25 20

5.  Results 5.1  Hypothesis 1 The six statements of the questionnaire were divided into two dimensions. The first examined credibility, the second, fear. The correlation of the items within each dimension was tested by a factor analysis with Rotated Component Matrix. Differences were observed on both dimensions. Table 2 shows the results: Table 2.  Credibility and fear

Germany

Poland

USA

Japan

Standard Standard Standard Standard Mean deviation Mean deviation Mean deviation Mean deviation Credibility 2.34 Fear 4.0

1.43 1.44

3.50 3.89

1.29 1.57

1.11 1.28

1.40 1.18

2.31 5.35

1.75 1.38

In the eyes of the German and Japan subjects credibility was nearly the same. Polish subjects exhibited a large difference (1.1) compared to its neighboring country, Germany. However, in the dimension of fear, the results of these two countries were nearly identical. The Polish participants trusted the credibility of North Korean regime and were afraid of it. The Americans did not trust the regime and were not afraid of its nuclear power. Only Germans and the Japanese did not trust the capabilities of the “rogue” regime, but were afraid of it. The difference between the lowest degree of fear and the highest that is between American and

 Jan Prasil, Maria Dudusova & Jan Auracher

Japanese subjects, was substantial (4.07). The results obtained from Japanese and American participants deviated clearly and exhibited extreme values. The German and Polish results were average. The highest degree of credibility was expressed by the Polish participants (Mean 3.5; Standard Deviation 1.29). They were followed by the German participants (Mean 2.34; Standard Deviation 1.43) and the Japanese (Mean 2.31; Standard Deviation 1.75) subjects. The lowest credibility of the North Korean regime was given by the participants from the USA (Mean 1.11; Standard Deviation 1.4). anova revealed a highly significant influence of the variable nation on both credibility (F = 5.394, p < 0.001) and fear (F = 13.923, p < 0.001). Significant influence of gender or age on credibility could not be observed. However, there were significant differences concerning fear depending on age (F = 5.399, p < 0.01) and gender (F = 3.225, p < 0.05). These results confirmed that there are significant differences between the countries examined. 5.2  Hypothesis 2 Our results did not confirm the hypothesis that fear increases in correlation to geographical distance. In the geographically nearest country, Japan, there seems to be, according to our results, more demonstration of fear. The highest results for fear perception were given by the Japanese subjects (Mean 5.37; Standard Deviation 1.38), followed by the German (Mean 4.0; Standard Deviation 1.44) and Polish (Mean 3.89; Standard Deviation 1.57) subjects. The lowest rate for fear was shown in the results of the American participants (Mean 1.28; Standard Deviation 1.18). We could not confirm the hypothesis that fear is reduced by the access to more and more detailed information in the vicinity of North Korea. The results show that there is a large (4.09) difference between the level of fear in Japan and the USA. On the other hand, we can state that the fear levels in the neighboring countries of Germany and Poland are nearly the same.

6.  Conclusion This study confirmed that there are similarities in the attitude towards North Korea among participants within one country and that these cultural attitudes do significantly differ according to geographical distance. While the answers from the Japanese and the American subjects took the extreme positions for both dimensions (credibility and fear), the two European countries tended more towards neutral answers. The participants from Japan felt most threatened, followed by the participants from Germany and Poland. Between the German and the Polish group there are only minimal differences. It is therefore plausible to assume that there may be other cultural factors which influence people’s opinions and fears.



Chapter 20.  Threat and geographical distance 

In contrast to our second hypothesis, however, the participants from the United States proved to exhibit the lowest degree of fear. At the same time, they also assigned the lowest level of credibility. This is in opposition to the official argumentations of the government and to the villainous image of North Korea used in the mass media. Interesting is the result that German and Japanese subjects did not trust the capabilities of the “rogue” regime, but were afraid of it. The numbers demonstrate a conspicuous discrepancy between the credibility and the fear. With regard to the fact that comments by the government and the media reports in Germany and Poland strongly correspond to the American ones, the differences between the results of the subjects from these countries are considerable. Based on the results of this study, we can assume that there is fear of North Korea in Germany and Poland in spite of the fact that the potential threat would in all likelihood be directed at the USA or Northeast Asia.

References Bodderas, E. 2006. War es wirklich die Bombe? Welt Online October 10: http://www.welt.de/ print-welt/article158482/War_es_wirklich_die_Bombe.html Mayntz, G. 2006. Nordkorea ganz nah. Rheinische Post October 20: http://www.presseportal. de/pm/30621/889567/rheinische_post New York Sun. 2006. Editorial, October 10: http://www.nysun.com/article/41218 Pilling D. 2006a. Abe calls test “absolutely unacceptable”. Financial Times October 09: http:// search.ft.com/ftArticle?queryText=serious+threat+%5Bthat%5D+would+transform+in+a +major+way+&y=0&aje=true&x=0&id=061009004219&ct=0&nclick_check=1 Pilling, D. 2006b. Pyongyang test sparks Abe’s first crisis. Financial Times October 10: http:// search.ft.com/ftArticle?queryText=“to%20be%20a%20massive%20outcry”%20&y=0&aje =false&x=0&id=061010000976&ct=0 Powell, B. 2006a. A Nuclear Nightmare Comes True. Time October 09: http://www.time.com/ time/world/article/0,8599,1544017,00.html Powell, B. 2006b. When Outlaws Get the Bomb. Time October 15: http://www.time.com/time/ magazine/article/0,9171,1546342,00.html Rather, D. 2006. North Korea: The Hermit Kingdom. CBS News Jan. 16: http://www.cbsnews. com/stories/2006/01/12/60minutes/main1203973.shtml Sommer, Th. 2003. Eine Hölle, kalt und dunkel. Die Zeit February 20: http://www.zeit.de/2003/ 09/Nordkorea Spiller, P. 2006. N Korea test – failure or fake? BBC News 16 October: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/ hi/world/asia-pacific/6040494.stm

chapter 21

The apology of popular fiction Everyday uses of literature in Poland Maciej Maryl Popular fiction is expelled from literary canons and is usually treated as a form of ludic or emotional relaxation and an escape from daily problems (Nell 1988; Radway 1984). Drawing on the results of my study on Polish readers, I claim that reading popular fiction, as an everyday-life activity, is much more than a simple leisurely activity, and plays a vital role in the way readers cope with their surrounding environment. Employing the framework of phenomenological sociology I argue that reading popular fiction can be described in terms of a rational action undertaken in order to achieve specific pragmatic goals, such as emotional tuning or search for subjectively important information. Keywords:  phenomenological sociology, life world, reading, popular fiction, canon, Poland

1.  Introduction Why are some books perceived to be better than others? It is customary for works considered memorable for a certain culture to be listed in various canons. A knowledge of the canon marks one’s cultural competence. Sometimes, however, the other functions of reading, or its distinctive role in readers’ everyday lives are largely overlooked, and literature is perceived only through its social role, as the recent changes in the canon of required reading in Poland attests. The revision of the canon was proposed by Roman Giertych, deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education in Jarosław Kaczyński’s conservative Cabinet from May 2006 to August 2007. The canon he planned to revise is very important in Poland, as it contains readings that are required at matura – a high school ending examination. On May 2007 Minister Giertych proposed to cross out Witold

 Maciej Maryl

Gombrowicz, a great writer and critic of Polish nationalism and for non-Polish authors he left no room for Kafka or Dostoyevsky. Instead, Giertych added to the list two books by Jan Dobraczyński, a Catholic writer. The other author he added was John Paul II and two of his works: a book of essays (full text) and his biography (Giertych 2007). The canon was reshaped in order to convey the ‘right’ ideology, namely conservatism, Catholicism, and a specific version of blind patriotism, rooted in the hard times of the 18th and 19th century and criticized ever since. The debate provoked by Giertych’s decision, which swept through the Polish public sphere in the following months, did not undermine the basic concept of the literary canon, understood as a codification of books, which present ideas significant and fundamental to a certain community. The controversy was then not solely about the books, but about their ideological perspective. The discussion and its outcome (rejection of Giertych’s proposal by the Prime Minister) was one of the factors leading to the collapse of the ruling coalition and early elections. Although this is an extreme example of imposing ideology on the canon of required reading, it tells us something about the ways we perceive the canon in our cultures. The concept of the canon as a pillar of society draws heavily on the romantic understanding of literature. In 1765, Samuel Johnson pictured literature as an expression of general nature. Yet, in 1773 Johan Gotfried von Herder introduced the notion of literature as the extract of national spirit, which influenced the philosophy of romanticism. Due to political changes in the19th century and the emergence of the concept of nation (Anderson 1983), literature started to be conceived in a rather different perspective, as a nation-building factor, and was taught that way at universities (Hillis-Miller 2002: 2–8). It is through literature that the members of a community learn where they belong, and construct their social, cultural and national identities. Drawing from Fish’s (2004) concept of interpretive community, we may say that the canon is what the members have agreed upon to be valuable for the community itself. Community members, we can say from this perspective, choose certain books and agree upon the way they should be interpreted. Paulson (1997) provides a definition which captures this notion accurately. According to him, the canon is “the nebulous collection of works that at a given time are seen as enduring and worthy of study, and with which serious aspirants to membership in literary communities must be acquainted” (1997: 227). In the preface to The Western Canon (1994), Harold Bloom characterizes the discussion of the canon, as a debate between the right-wing defenders of the Canon, who wish to preserve it for its supposed (and nonexistent) moral values, and the academic-journalistic network I have dubbed the School of Resentment, who wish to overthrow the



Chapter 21.  The apology of popular fiction: Everyday uses of literature in Poland 

Canon in order to advance their supposed (and nonexistent) programs for social change (1994: 4)

This notion captures accurately the approach to the reading lists discussed before. Bloom, however, distinguishes another type of the canon, which he defines as “the relation of an individual reader and writer to what has been preserved out of what has been written” (ibid.: 17). Bloom seems to believe in the canon as a rather universal set, independent of social or political currents, since its principles of selectivity are “founded upon severely artistic criteria” (ibid.: 23). Hence, he distances himself from debates over the literary canon, claiming there are some works in which aesthetic quality is indisputable and universal. The difference between those approaches does not only concern the criteria of selection (memorable ideology vs. literary values), but also the role literature plays in readers’ lives. Bloom questions social uses of literature when he claims that “reading deeply in the Canon will not make one a better or a worse person, a more useful or more harmful citizen” (ibid.: 30). Instead he adds: “All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality” (ibid.). In other words, what is the most valuable here is the unique encounter between the reader and the text, not the memorable meaning the text conveys. Yet, the question remains, how should we treat popular literature that is excluded from literary canons of both types, since it seems not to convey any values fundamental for a community, nor it is of exceptional literary quality. Critics often overlook the positive aspects of popular literature, treating it only as a part of a mighty machinery of mass culture. They conceive of it as “stories of adventure and excitement which satisfy desires for variety frustrated by urban living” (Kernan 1973: 40). A similar, but not so critical approach, may be found in studies into popular readership (Nell 1988; Radway 1984). Those researchers view the act of reading popular fiction as a form of ludic or emotional relaxation and an escape from daily problems. Although I do agree with such a perspective, I claim that reading popular fiction, as an everyday-life activity, means much more than a simple leisurely activity, and plays a vital role in the way readers cope with their surrounding environment. In this paper I show how readers use popular literature as a tool for achieving various goals. The experience of popular fiction, I will claim, could be as much rewarding for an individual as the exploration of the canon. Although such approach was presented before (eg., in Radway 1984) I would like to discuss everyday uses of literature in Poland, in the light of institutional approach towards reading, mentioned in the opening paragraphs of this paper. I reckon that the framework of phenomenological sociology applied in this paper may provide interesting insights on this field.

 Maciej Maryl

2.  The canon and everyday uses of literature Popular fiction is non-canonical, what evokes a specific feeling of guilt in readers. In the course of my study (Maryl 2007), I undertook a participant observation in a public library. When my researcher’s identity was revealed to a lady in her fifties, who was putting a number of romances on the counter, she cried: “These are not my usual readings, I’ve read the classical books, but I need something lighter right now”. This sense of guilt stems from the awareness of disobedience to cultural norms of reading. The study (ibid.) was mostly based on interviews with employees of public libraries. Librarians would rather see their clients reading canonical works, but admit that common readers tend to prefer popular fiction to canonical readings. From the readers’ perspective the canon is something culturally approved and desired, but at the same time considered difficult and boring, and as such, dismissed. Moreover, common readers feel the cultural pressure on their choices and they ‘know’ that they ‘should’ read the classical and acclaimed fiction, but they do not. As one of the librarians put it – they suffer from the “unbearable lightness of their readings”. Nell traces the roots of this feeling of guilt to Protestant ethics, which entails “that pleasure must be earned, and that the effortlessness of ludic reading makes its pleasures as hollow as the euphoria of the junkie or the orgasm of the masturbator” (1988: 32). Nell claims that this dissonant, caused by reading literature acknowledged as simplistic, can be resolved in two ways: “One is to acknowledge that I do in fact read trash, but that I have a moral license to do so; the other is to argue that while many people read trash […] my own reading matter is clearly not trash” (ibid.: 44). As Radway observes in her study on female romance readers “Guilt arises as a result of the readers’ own uneasiness about indulging in such an obviously pleasurable experience” (1984: 106). Both Radway and Nell agree that readers resolve this dissonant by claiming the information value of the books they read (Radway 1984: 112–114; Nell 1988: 44). Women in Radway’s study believed “very strongly that romance reading is worthwhile because the stories provide pleasure while the activity of reading challenges them to learn new words and information about a world they find intriguing and all too distant” (ibid.: 116). Yet, I believe that this informational function of popular readings shall be considered as something more than a simple justification of readers’ choices. I claim that readers use books in order to fulfil their own goals, which are not entirely of a .  All quotes from the study in Maryl 2007 I translated from Polish.



Chapter 21.  The apology of popular fiction: Everyday uses of literature in Poland 

ludic or emotional nature. In order to support this claim I will draw on the results of my study in which I investigated the role of literature in readers’ everyday lives (Maryl 2007). Employing the framework of phenomenological sociology, I wanted to investigate how readers take the advantage of literature in coping with daily life. This approach is different from the one discussed by Paulson (1997), who concentrated on practical aspects of literacy and literature’s contribution to improvement of one’s professional skills (e.g., decision-making). In my study I am concentrating on less abstract goals determined by one’s everyday-life. Later in this chapter I will claim that some everyday reading practices are not a simple leisure, being more complex and having specific pragmatic goals. I employed the theoretical framework of phenomenological sociology, focusing on the life world and the actor’s practical interest. Life world, a concept based on Edmund Husserl’s notion of Lebenswelt (Husserl 1970), is a phenomenological construct through which we experience reality. Life world, in general, is the world as we see it and experience it, a sort of a mental filter, through which we select information, being guided by our practical interest (Schutz & Luckmann 1973). As Schutz (1964) claims, our life worlds are divided into several spheres of importance, which are put into hierarchical order according to our practical interest (from the most important sphere, to the least important one). Robert Gorman provides a good summary of Schutz’s argument: we are all unique actors, each a product of a biographically determined situation, belonging to only one person. Meaning and knowledge, those factors determining how we define our situations and act, are constituted subjectively through our perceiving and experiencing the world (1975: 6).

Every action undertaken by actors has its ‘in-order-to’ motive: a “future desired state of affairs as anticipated when action is begun” (ibid.: 4). All such motives are subject to the actors’ life world: “each actor experiences and defines his situation and chooses his projects in the context of his own unique, subjective existence” (ibid.: 3). In other words, Schutz claims that every action has its purpose, which is dictated by one’s own biography. I will claim that reading popular fiction is such an activity, through which readers achieve individually determined goals and enrich their life worlds. The structure of the life world, a biographically determined situation, conditions a reader’s response. The goals achieved through reading, the experience gained in the fictional world, constitute a part of the life world. This active search for information and emotions is deeply rooted in one’s everyday experience. The patterns of readers’ behavior, presented below, outline the importance of their everyday motives. That is the main difference between socio-phenomenological

 Maciej Maryl

inquiry and the psychological approach taken by Nell, who measured the ‘interest in a book’ by “asking readers to decide which book they would most like to relax with” (1988: 122). In the study below I am not primarily interested in the psychological nature of reading processes, but rather in reading as an intentional act having its roots and consequences in everyday life. 3.  Methodology Investigating readers’ everyday reading behavior requires access to actual readers in the most ‘natural’ circumstances, where possible bias (e.g., economical factors) is minimal. Hence I decided to investigate the clients of public libraries who access the books freely, over a convenient time span, with minimal effort (e.g., they do not have to pay for the books they choose). The main methodological problem here concerned readers’ self-idealizations of their literary attitudes. Large sociological surveys on reading seem to back up this claim (e.g., biannual surveys conducted by the Polish National Library; see Straus et al. 2004). People asked directly about their reading habits tend to overemphasize the amount of “acclaimed” readings among their choices. In order to avoid the self-idealization bias I drew on Alfred Schutz’s concept of a well-informed citizen (Schutz 1964). He argues that a well-informed citizen mediates between a man on the street (not interested in understanding more than he needs to), and the expert (who specializes in a narrow sphere of knowledge). Well-informed citizens have both practical and theoretical knowledge of a certain topic. That is why I chose librarians to be well-informed citizens in my study, to serve as informants guiding me through the everyday world of their clients – readers. The world of readers’ everyday life is complex and its exploration, I believe, requires a qualitative approach. That is why I drew on interpretative sociology, aiming at ‘understanding’ the motives behind readers everyday behavior, rather than ‘explaining’ them in a quantitative manner. Hence, the results do not aspire to be representative or statistically valid. That is the task of quantitative researchers. Yet, in this chapter I am proposing an interpretation of interviews from the perspective of phenomenological sociology, what, I reckon, sheds some light on everyday reading practices of Polish readers. In the course of the study I applied such qualitative techniques as interviews and observation. I conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with employees of 11 different libraries, and one participant observation in a public library. In order to differentiate the sample I decided to visit libraries in villages, small and medium towns in the Warsaw area. In large cities (Warsaw and Cracow) I chose 3 libraries from different districts to ensure the sample’s diversification.



Chapter 21.  The apology of popular fiction: Everyday uses of literature in Poland 

The interviews were carried on in April 2007. In selected libraries I interviewed those librarians (one per library), who had direct contact with readers. In order to learn as much as I can from librarians themselves, and to avoid framing their responses in previously set categories, I asked them open questions, concerning motivation for reading (why people read), aspects of the book choice (what readers mention, when asking for a book recommendation; do they mention different), the role of literature among other activities of the everyday life (how often their clients read and in which circumstances). The interviews were recorded and transcribed. Both transcripts and notes from the observation were interpreted in the framework of phenomenological sociology, according to discovered patterns. I am not going to discuss the study as whole. What follows is a presentation of some aspects of the study, covering the role of popular fiction in readers’ everyday lives. 4.  Results: Everyday uses of literature I have already mentioned that the leisure reading is usually described as an escape from everyday problems and a mental relaxation; I reckon that Eva Maria Scherf (1990), a German cognitivist, provides better categories to capture this phenomenon. Scherf distinguishes three kinds of reception: reception as an action, activity and operation. The first two types describe the everyday reading, whereas the last one, which I leave out here, refers to a scientific activity, such as literary criticism, or academic interpretation. Reading as an action, in Scherf ’s terms, serves as an emotional stimuli or a tool to “to break down particular internal tensions (for example, by laughing)” (ibid.: 491). The other type, reading as an activity, is based on the reader’s individual biography, and its superior motive is a “desire to (re)cognize oneself and the world in appropriating a text […] the reader/viewer/listener seeks to take from the text whatever s/he can relate as directly as possible to personal practice (ibid.)”. Both those aspects are equally visible and important in the reading of popular fiction. In her study of romance readers, Radway concentrates on the emotional side of the reading process, whose main goals are relaxation and escape (1984: 88). It seems that in her study both types of reading proposed by Scherf are subject to the psychological benefits of the reader. I will compare my findings with her framework, discussing the everyday uses of literature firstly as a tool for emotional tuning, secondly, as a means of obtaining information about the world. Radway’s framework of leisure reading allows us to distinguish three aspects of the emotional impact of reading in everyday life: (1) escape from daily problems (ibid.: 93); (2) relieving tensions (ibid.: 95); (3) compensation through

 Maciej Maryl

vicarious emotional nurturance and imaginative conversation with adults from a broad spectrum of social space (ibid.: 113). I conceive of these phenomena as different forms of what readers acquire through the mechanism we could call ‘losing touch with reality’, ‘being lost in a book’ (Nell 1984), or transportation (Gerrig 1993; Green & Brock 2000; Green 2004). However, I claim this mechanism is not autotelic, as a simple leisure is. Contrarily, it always has its purpose. The traveler who sets off on the journey into the fictional realm of a book, always has some basic interests (not necessarily conscious) she wants to fulfil during this trip. I am going to discuss the practical, everyday side of this psychological phenomenon in more detail, drawing on the results of my study (Maryl 2007). What follows is not an attempt to construct any typology, but rather a list of several everyday motives that guide the popular fiction reading process. The proposed perspective shows how psychological aspects of reading are employed in readers’ daily life. The motives I am going to discuss are: (a) seeking specific emotions (positive/negative), (b) emotional stimulation, (c) relaxation, (d) escape through vicarious activities. a.  Processing of a literary text relies heavily on the readers’ mood and their need to alter or deepen it. This motive is described by Radway as a general aim of romance readers (1985: 90). Readers often ask librarians: “Help me find something cheerful, funny, so I could break away for a while”. Popular fiction readers often look for positive emotions, for example, this love-stories enthusiast, who said: “I had to release the tension. You know, regardless if it’s silly or not, I just had to”. Reading helps in modifying the mood evoked by everyday events. Perceiving positive events in protagonists’ lives leads to the consoling observation: ‘at least somebody (namely, the protagonist) has succeeded’. b.  Reading also serves as an emotional stimulus, a sort of a natural stimulation tool. This function is very often sought by persons who work nights, such as nurses on emergency shifts, for instance. Those workers read to avoid sleeping. One librarian observed that night watchmen often come to her library, “cause they have this sort of job, that you just sit and turn stupid. And then they suddenly realize they want a book”. c.  But rather it is the contrary function of reading that is the most common– literature serves as a tool of soothing emotions and facilitating falling asleep. As one of the librarians in my study put it: “I can’t sleep. To avoid lying on bed and thinking, I read”. Literature serves here as a kind of a natural sleeping pill. It is worth of mentioning that the function a text has to play determines the book choice. The text has to be simple and by no means absorbing. As one librarian admits: “nothing lulls me to sleep so well as this monotony, this stupid monotony”. Otherwise, literature serves as a stimulation.



Chapter 21.  The apology of popular fiction: Everyday uses of literature in Poland 

d.  A different form of losing touch with reality is experiencing vicariously through reading. It occurs when a reader is deprived of the possibility of action. Entering the world of fiction provides her with similar emotions as in the case of real action. As Radway puts it, “they escape figuratively into a fairy tale” (1985: 93). We can distinguish here a temporary and a durable deprivation. A book serves as a temporary, vicarious activity when a reader travels in public transportation, for instance. She has to remain in a static position, hence concentration on events from the fictional world helps her keep the cognitive resources busy. The actual life world is torn out from the actor’s body, and it’s being removed to a different reality. If the deprivation is durable, reading substitutes an actual activity, which certain readers can no longer perform to the extent they need it. It is a vital function of reading, especially in the case of people having much spare time, such as retired persons. Literature helps to kill time, or rather to sustain the contact with the social reality people are deprived of. Reading serves as a substitute of a common social activity, providing readers with insights into biographies and motivations of other people. As I tried to show, the psychological aspects of literary response can be described in terms of a rational action undertaken in order to achieve specific goals. In other words, readers take the advantage of the properties of the reading process and make good use of them to achieve non-literary goals. The same, I would claim, goes for the other type of response, Sherf calls reading as an action. I have already mentioned the approach proposed by Radway (1984) and Nell (1988), who treat readers’ claims about the informational value of popular fiction as an excuse not to read more acclaimed books. I will claim, however, that readers, guided by their biographically determined practical interest, do seek and do find subjectively important information in popular fiction. In order to show that dimension of leisure reading, I would like to focus on those parts of my study that dealt with the relation between readers’ biographies and their choice of books. Librarians, who usually know their clients from informal conversations during their visits in libraries, observe that readers, in general, search for topics relevant to their own experience, biographies and everyday problems. Some readers, for instance, ask for books on family relationships. “It is a sort of a book”, a librarian explains, “which conveys the family values and reassures the reader”. The book serves here as a tool for attaining intersubjectivity: the reader observes a different (but similar) world and draws some conclusions from this observation. This practical interest is either directed towards the unknown content one wants to discover, or concerns the already known situations or problems that will be either illuminated from a different perspective or solved.

 Maciej Maryl

In the first case the practical motive is to deepen one’s knowledge about the world by gaining information relevant to one’s own biography and hierarchy of importance. The knowledge attained in this way becomes a part of one’s experience. A good example of this function of literary reading is the reader’s search for guidance in the previously unknownsome unfamiliar situation. For instance, a reader asked one librarian about the novels on the Middle-East, because her daughter has an Arab boyfriend and the mother was worried. In the case of the inward-directed reading, the aim is to elaborate difficult situations or problems of the daily life that bother the reader in a particular moment. “If a reader suffers from an illness”, a librarian explains, “he searches for a book about it. And it doesn’t have to be a grave illness”. In a similar way teenage readers ask for books dedicated to such problems as addictions, first love or eating disorders. Such reading deepens their understanding of their own actions and attitudes. It also gives them access to both different patterns of behaviour and the reasons behind them. Although Nell claimed that practical interest in reading is rather attached to non-fiction (1984: 122), my interviews with librarians show the opposite. Readers tend to prefer to read fictional accounts rather than scientific books on aspects vital for them, be it middle-eastern culture or bulimia. This preference tells us a lot about the role of literature in acquiring new knowledge. Literature provides us with a thick, elaborated description of both depicted events and protagonists’ behavior. Hence, readers prefer to explore the world through literature, because literary reading is by no means a passive act of acquiring new information. Contrarily, it is a sort of an active dialogue of the reader’s own experience with the new content, a dialogue directed by a practical interest and facilitated by literature.

5.  Conclusion As I tried to show, popular fiction reading should not be analysed exclusively as a leisurely activity. I claim that readers use this kind of literature in order to achieve some pragmatic goals of everyday life. I argued that reading in the popular fiction is guided by the biographically determined reader’s practical interest. That is to say that readers use literature as a tool for alternating and expanding their life worlds. This approach may be useful in education. Knowing the possible functions of literature should help us to pay more attention to students’ awareness of what they can find in literary texts and how they can use them on their own in order to cope with everyday life. Treating literature solely as a sociological document conveying ideology, as happened lately in Poland, is not enough, and it raises students’ negative attitudes towards literary texts.



Chapter 21.  The apology of popular fiction: Everyday uses of literature in Poland 

I do not claim that we should get rid of canonical readings, or abandon detailed analyses of certain works. But I do claim that in the classroom we should also pay attention to those areas of literature that are usually omitted and underestimated by literary scholars, such as popular fiction. The emphasis should not be put on the history of literature, but on the reading process, namely on how readers can benefit from works of different periods, including the canonical ones, in order to enrich their life worlds and deal better with the surrounding environment. Hence I strongly call for rehabilitation of popular fiction. It should not be overlooked by architects of reading lists. Perhaps this kind of reading does not convey the meaning memorable for the society, nor it embodies distinctive literary values. It is however still important for individual readers, since such reading plays a vital role in their experience of everyday life. Let me paraphrase Bloom, quoted earlier in this paper, all that popular fiction can bring one is one’s confrontation with one’s everyday life.

References Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso Edtions/NLB. Bloom, H. 1994. The Western Canon. The Books and School of the Ages. New York NY: Harcourt Broad Company. Fish, S. 2004. Interpretive communities. In Literary Theory: An Anthology. J. Rivkin & M. Ryan (eds), 217–222. Malden MA: Blackwell. Giertych, R. 2007. A bill of changes in the literary canon (Polish only), http://bip.men.gov.pl/ akty_projekty/projekt_rozporzadzenia_240507.pdf. Gerrig, R.J. 1993. Experiencing Narrative Worlds. On the Psychological Activities of Reading. New Haven CT: Yale University Press. Green, M.C. & Brock, T.C. 2000. The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79(5): 701–721. Green, M.C. 2004. Transportation into narrative worlds: The role of prior knowledge and perceived realism. Discourse Processes 38(2): 247–266. Herder, J.G. von 2006 [1773]. Shakespeare. Selected Writings on Aesthetics. G. Moore (ed. & transl.), 291–307. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Hillis-Miller, J. 2002. On literature. New York NY: Routledge. Johnson, S. 1765. Preface. The plays of William Shakespeare, London: J. & R. Tonson. Kernan, A.B. 1973. What is Literature? New Literacy History 5(1): 31–40 Maryl, M. 2007. Czym jest literatura? Potoczne pojęcie literatury i funkcje lektury w życiu codziennym czytelników (What is literature? The common concept of literature and the functions of reading in everyday life). Warsaw: Warsaw University. Nell, V. 1988. Lost in a Book. Psychology of Reading for Pleasure. New Haven CT: Yale University Press. Radway, J. 1984. Reading the Romance. Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill NC: North Carolina University Press.

 Maciej Maryl Strauss, G., Wolff, K. & Wierny, S. 2004. Książka na początku wieku. Społeczny zasięg książki w Polsce. (A Book in the beginning of the century. The social scope of a book in Poland). Warszawa: Biblioteka Narodowa. Schutz, A. 1964. The well-informed citizen. In Collected Papers. Vol. II. Studies in Social Theory, 120–134.The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Schutz, A. & Luckmann, T. 1973. The Structures of the Life-World (Strukturen der Lebenswelt). R.M. Zaner & H.T. Engelhardt, Jr. (transl.). Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press.

afterword

A matter of versifying Tradition, innovation, and the sonnet form in English Walter Nash “Tradition” is represented by “formalist” (“metrist”) verse; “Innovation” by “aformalist” (“free”) composition. This birthday tribute to Professor van Peer takes the formalist side, and discusses innovation and its possibilities in the context of the sonnet form. The form and its traditional variants are discussed, then ten original sonnets are presented in first draft, the opening section of a proposed sequence called Sonnets from the Wilderness. A commentary on the text, its intentions, innovations, and compositional problems, then follows.

1.  Introduction … for the unquiet heart and brain A use in measured language lies. 

(Tennyson, In Memoriam V)

There is a type of poetry journal, of the “vanguard” kind just now quite influential in the UK, which professes to publish only verse that is “contemporary”, “relevant” and “innovative”. If prospective contributors should ask, “contemporary with whom?”; “relevant to what?”; “innovative how?” they will usually be advised to purchase and study some back numbers of the journal to find out what sort of thing it publishes, so that they may learn to write that sort of thing, for possible publication in a contemporary, relevant, and innovative magazine. This might seem like a prescription for the begetting of sterile poems, but is intended, I believe, as a serious invitation to would-be poets to come in and learn originality by example. All serious poets (but what is “serious”?) have a wish to write original things. For some, this means “without precedent” or at least “original in intent”; which is optimistic at best, for nothing is ever quite new or wholly unprecedented. For others, originality exists as a possibility within a tradition, and derives from

 Walter Nash

innovations, variations, licenses taken with patterns that have existed for maybe hundreds of years. The proponents of patterning make a poetic tribe commonly called “metrists”, or “formalists”; the counter-movement in modern poetics is towards a measured formlessness, or “free verse” . Each type, the formal and the free, has its compositional principles. The benchmark of formalism is acceptance of a controlling and coordinating system of meter, an isochronic measure, or “timing”, like beats-to-the-bar in music. In verse composition it can be expressed as feet-to-the-line, – as in the “iambic pentameter” of Shakespearean blank verse – or as syllables-to-the-line, as in the “decasyllabic couplets” of Pope’s satires. These descriptions are companion perspectives on the “movement” of English verse, which is generally reckoned to be “accentual/syllabic”. To verse-makers these terminologies are abstractions, often beyond their knowing or caring. Their immediate guide is an instinctual count, a metronome-in-the-mind, governing the realization of rhythmical patterns. The benchmark of free verse, on the other hand, is a direct commitment to the perceived phrasal rhythms of speech, without reference to a metrical “idea”. The verse so conceived is presented in lines that deliberately frustrate the operations of “scansion”. Formal and free verse have their own sound patterns, their methods of phonological focus and prominence, e.g., in directing the placing or shifting of accents, or implying changes in sonority; in these things they perhaps do not differ fundamentally, after all, the one from the other, for poetry works by many devices to common effects. Each type has its great poems; for originality in formal verse, see Owen’s Strange Meeting; for a classic in free verse, see Lawrence’s Snake. Each type has its losers; some rhymes and formal rhythms are neat and trivial beyond significance, some free verses portentous and wordy beyond endurance. The lurking treachery of formal poems is that the metric regulation puts constraints on choices of the most fitting word, the accurate phrase; the writer says something that a complex stanza form will allow him to say, which may not be what he thought he wanted to say. (though he might decide that the exercise of finding rhymewords or accentually convenient phrases has a heuristic value, pointing him to something almost as good as what he proposed). The besetting stupor of free verse is that theoretically unfettered liberty will allow the poet to say not only what he wants to say, without let or hindrance, but also what he need not say, without loss or hazard, but will go on saying, doggedly, until all compression and rhythmic power is dissipated.

.  …which Robert Graves used to denounce as oxymoronic: for if it were verse, he said, it could not be free, and if free, could not be verse. T.S. Eliot’s typically Delphic view was that “no verse could be free for the man who wants to do a good job”. He considered, however, that free verse could be scanned. Graves objected that if it could be scanned, it was not free. See Eliot 1957, p.37, and Graves 1955, p.85.



A matter of versifying 

Good modern poets have long been sensitive to the problem of reconciling strict formality and a-metric freedom. For a fairly recent expression, see in 1991, the (originally) formalist Thom Gunn writing to the Jon Silkin: It seems to me that we have reached an impasse right now, and there is an urgent need to reconcile meter and free verse, if that is possible, because meter is getting starved without the improvisational powers, and free verse simply turns to very dull prose without any connections to song. (Silkin 1997: 4)

This statement represents a genuine anxiety on the part of the Anglo-American Gunn, seeking to rationalize a shift in the continuum of his poetic style, from the metric precision of his English beginnings towards the stand-at-ease of a new American persona, after his emigration to the USA. He is right about the “improvisational powers” that good free verse can enhance. He is mistaken, however, in implying that formal verse lacks in itself any resort of innovation and improvisation. The history and continual renovation of lyrical forms speaks against this. There is simply no limited number of lyric patterns; poets devise them, or experiment with them continually, and every experiment in metrical form is a type of “improvisation”. Even a traditional form like the sonnet, ostensibly set in a mould too fixed for much innovation, still leaves room for experiment. 2.  Ghosts from the past Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned, Mindless of its true honours; with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart; the melody Of this small pipe gave ease to Petrarchs wound …  (Wordsworth, Miscellaneous Sonnets, II.1)

The sonnet, as form and idea, is a traveler; it has rambled all over the globe. In origin, however, as every good European and Professor of International Hermeneutics knows, it is Italian, and is primarily associated with the name of Francesco Petrarca (or Petrarch in English), an innovator in his own time, whose love poems to an idealized mistress, Laura, are set in intricately rhymed patterns of pentameter, in fourteen hendecasyllabic lines, divisible into an octave (the first eight) and a sestet (the concluding six). The Petrarchan model has in the octave, usually the rhyme-scheme a-b-b-a a-b-b-a, and in the sestet a freer choice, e.g., of c-d-e-c-d-e, or c-d-c-c-d-c, or c-d-e-d-c-e. The fourteen lines represent in effect a complete package of “argument” (in the octave) and “response” (in the sestet). After the eighth line comes the pause and about-turn that Italians call the volta. This, purists insist, is a necessary mark of the true sonnet. But the Petrarchan sestet, in his sonnets In vita e morte di Madonna Laura, is not always a retort; it is as often the extension of a theme.

 Walter Nash

Petrarch’s fourteenth century invention was carried to England in the sixteenth century. The bearer was Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542), scholar, diplomat, the finest of lutenist poets, and incidentally lover of Anne Boleyn, until Henry VIII staked his claim to her. Wyatt brought back from an ambassadorial trip to Italy in 1526–7 some translations or imitations of poems from the In vita. This was one of them, a rendering of Petrarch’s sonnet XC, Pace no trovo: I find no peace, and all my war is done; I fear and hope, I burn and freeze like ice I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise And naught I have, and all the world I seize on. That looseth nor locketh holdeth me in prison, And holdeth me not, yet can I scape nowise Nor letteth me live or die at my devise And yet of death it giveth no occasion. Without eyes I see, and without tongue I plain; I desire to perish, and yet I ask health I love another, and yet I hate myself; I feed me in sorrow, and laugh in all my pain. Likewise displeaseth me both death and life, And my delight is causer of this strife [“That” in line 5 = “that which”, i.e., “what, whatever”]

As Pace no trovo is a love-plaint to Madonna Laura, so this complains to Ms Boleyn. It is by no means a slavish imitation, and could never serve as a crib. It has some moments of verbal ingenuity: for example, “all the world I seize on” in line 4, glimpses at “seizin”, “take seizin”, an Anglo-French legal term (still in use), meaning “take freehold possession of ”. The meter, however, presents problems to all strict counters of beats and syllables. Critics have damned or apologized for Wyatt´s metrical procedures in these and other poems (e.g., the great lyrical plaint, “They flee from me that sometime did me seek”, another Ann Boleyn poem). They speak of “awkwardness” and “tentativeness”, or of the sonnets as “mere exercises … roughly jotted down in whatever broken rhythms came readiest to hand” (see Hollander & Kermode, 1973, p.116; and Chambers 1933, p.122). In his Petrarchan sonnet-versions, Wyatt was attempting to adapt eleven-syllable lines to what instinct told him was a decasyllabic norm for English. He wrote, furthermore, as an instrumentalist, with a concept of performance that admitted of changes of tempo, “slurs” and “rests”; above all, what he heard as he wrote was the magical metronome-in-the-mind, spoken of above, the unarithmetical measure that adjudges to itself the rightness of a reading or a speaking. His translation of Pace no trovo requires no apology on technical grounds, it stands up as an English poem. It is particularly remarkable in one respect, if we compare the



A matter of versifying 

rhyme schemes in the two poems. Pace no trovo has this: a-b-a-b a-b-a-b/c-d-e c-d-e – the strict Petrarchan norm. But I have no peace has this: a-b-b-a a-b-b-a/ c-d-d c-e-e, with a sestet ending in a couplet, so emphatically that we might call it a “clinching sestet”. None of the In vita sonnets clinches a poem in this way. And because it has no obvious turnabout, no volta, the scheme of I have no peace might be read as a-b-b-a/a-b-b-a/c-d-d-c/e-e . It is, indeed, a Petrarchan sonnet “ghosting” the form-to-come of the Shakespearean. This was the scheme that Wyatt devised, and that Wyatt’s friend and poetic imitator, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey used in his own, graceful, strictly metered sonnets. The “clinching sestet” was the prescription for numerous sonnets, indeed for the majority of those written in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The greatest of Elizabethan sonneteers, Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586) used it for many of the poems in his great sonnet cycle, Astrophel and Stella. But he was not a man to follow trends tamely. The first poem in his Petrarchan sequence is written in alexandrines, French-flavored dodecasyllables, not easy to manage in English. Sidney manages them expertly, all the way through to a clinching sestet: Loving in truth and fain in verse my love to show That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain. Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know, Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain. I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe: Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain, Oft turning other’s leaves, to see if thence would flow Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburned brain. But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay, Invention, study’s child, fled stepdame Nature’s blows, And others´ feet still seemed but strangers in my way. Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite, ”Fool!” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart and write”.

This is an extraordinary declaration of independence, by a man resolved not to read back numbers of anyone’s pamphlet and try to do likewise, but to think and feel for himself. Sidney knew in all their complexity the problems which poets still have: of keeping or quitting a tradition, of using or ignoring models, of courting the artifice of creativeness, of responding to the rough prompts of one’s own temperament (“stepdame Nature’s blows”). He invokes the conventional image of the laboring poet (“great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes”), impatient and self-accusing in the discovery of his failures (“biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite”). Sidney, for sure, knew Petrarch, knew the tradition; but more, knew the problems of escaping from it, or not being enslaved by it. Here in this

 Walter Nash

first sonnet of a sequence, the man is declaring for his own Muse, i.e., his own way of doing things. And it is to this, not to his emblematic Stella (her emblem the star – as Petrarch’s Laura flourished in the emblem of the laurel tree) that the first of the 108 sonnets by Astrophel – “star-lover” – is addressed. What follows is an accomplished sequence, reading the implications of a romantic fiction which is the mask, or semblance, of a restless mind. Tucker Brooke´s comment on it is witty and just: “It is as Hazlitt said of Romeo and Juliet, the story of Hamlet in love” (in Baugh 1950: 479).

3.  Novelty and excitement The next two decades, from 1590 to 1610, were to be the heyday of the Elizabethan sonnet. Merely to list the sonnet sequences written at this time suggests that now the sonnet is contemporary, innovative, and relevant, an art form for people in the know: Samuel Daniel’s Delia, 1592; Michael Drayton’s Idea’s Mirror; Amours en quaterzaines, 1594; Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti, 1595; and in a genre apart from these, John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, circa 1609. In form, all follow the rhyme-pattern introduced by Wyatt and Surrey and generally used by Sidney, the “clinching sestet” that rolls up to an end-rhyme. Spenser’s sonnet has, in addition, a scheme of interlocking rhymes, through to the closing couplet: a-b-a-b b-c-b-c c-d-c-d e-e. In “tone of voice”, or “stance” they differ greatly, each sonneteer his own persona in his own relationship to the plausible fiction and inner depth of a theme. The reader of Spenser will discover a courtly refinement in, say, One day I wrote her name upon the strand [Amoretti, lxxv]; of Drayton, a robust street-style in Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part [Idea, lvi}; and in John Donne, Dean of St. Pauls, a pious fervor, like a Welsh preacher’s hwyl, voluble and passionate in, for example Batter my heart, three-personed God [Holy Sonnets, x]. In a few years, after Sidney’s exemplary prompting, the sonnet has made serious progress. It has also, by this point, progressed as far as the complicated Mr. William Shakespeare, whose Sonnets, collected and published in 1609, were presumably composed over a period of years. They are all written to a personal rhyme scheme, possibly derived from the “clinching sestet” model, but idiosyncratic in its distribution of the poetic theme across three quatrains and a concluding couplet, e.g., a-b-a-b/c-d-c-d/e-f-e-f/g-g. The dating and compositional order of the poems is a problem. Yet more enigmatic is the theme of this long recital of 154 poems. They are not fixed on a conveniently fictitious ladylove. They speak of male friendship, of homosexual relationship, of adulterous relationship with a promiscuous “dark lady”, of admiration, jealousy and suspicion of a poetic rival, of pleasure, of shame, of illness, of depression – of such things as are the common stuff of truelife



A matter of versifying 

theatre. “With this key, Shakespeare unlocked his heart”, Wordsworth said; to which Browning shrewdly retorted “Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!” His mature sonnets are psychological drama of a dark, uneasy sort, the work of a playwright. As early as 1595 he was making sonnets for dramatic use, in the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, where the first and second Acts have Prologues in the form of sonnets, and where a sonnet is actually involved in the dialogue of the play leading to the tender, sportive dialogue of the lovers’ meeting. In a paper on aesthetic criteria in the formation of a literary canon, Professor van Peer has drawn attention to this passage from the first act (I, v, 92–110) (van Peer 1996: 106): Romeo:

If I profane with my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this: My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

Juliet:

Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, Which mannerly devotion shows in this; For saints have hands that pilgrims´ hands do touch, And palm to palm is holy palmers´ kiss.

Romeo: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too? Juliet:

Aye, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

Romeo: O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do: They pray: grant thou, lest faith turn to despair. Juliet: Saints do not move, though grant for prayer’s sake. Romeo: Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take. 

(He kisses her)

The young lovers, playfully approaching their first kiss, are made to speak a sonnet, in the form a-b-a-b/c-d-c-d/e-f-e-f/g-g. Romeo speaks the first quatrain, Juliet the second, they share the third, and they have alternate lines in the clinching couplet. We have to suppose that some, at least, of the Elizabethan theatre audience would recognize what they were hearing; they would know a sonnet when they heard one, and they would be sensitive to its charm, its innocence, and its foreboding irony in this context. 4.  Beyond the golden age Knowing the heart of man is set to be The centre of his world, about the which These revolutions of disturbances Still roll;  (Samuel Daniel, Epistle to the Lady Margaret, Countess of Cumberland)

 Walter Nash

This Tudor-Jacobean time was the golden age of the English sonnet, when, it might seem, everything had been done with the form, and it had been put to doing everything it could do. Of course, the possibilities of the sonnet, as variable discourse, were far from exhausted. The centuries that followed brought interludes of sonnetry, periods of cultivation or recession in response to the mood and ideology of the time. (A notable dry interlude is the eighteenth century.) We have had our sessions of great sonneteers: in the seventeenth century, Milton, talking stern morals and republican zeal; among the Romantics, Wordsworth, talking of humble rivers and huge patriotism; among the Victorians Elizabeth Barrett Browning, role-playing the beloved adoring the lover, and incidentally putting in a word for feminism; in the twentieth century W.H. Auden with an unrivalled Petrarchan cycle of 27 poems, In Time of War, naming nor lover nor mistress, but rehearsing, with wry Stoic eloquence, the Fall of Man. The sonnet lives on, the poems continue to come, whatever their theme might be. Their properties are those our English folk-saying recommends for bridal wear on a wedding-day: “something old, something new, something borrowed”, and one more, “something blue” – for the bride, maybe, something concealed, for the poet, something to be found, a touch of originality, which, as noted at the onset of these musings, all serious and even jesting poets covet. 5.  A tribute Enough, if something from our hands have power To live, and act, and serve the future hour …  (Wordsworth, Sonnets on the River Duddon, xxxiv)

What remains to be said is personal; a few words addressed to the distinguished Herr Professor Dr. van Peer, my learned acquaintance, my deeply valued friend, Willie, onlie begetter of so many tributes, on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. I would like, sir, to conclude my own tribute by giving you the first sight of the first draft of a set of sonnets called “Sonnets in the Wilderness”. This set, a part of a planned larger sequence, is, you may say, an experiment in controlled innovation. My sonnets at times respect the form inherited from Petrarch & Co., and at times drastically modify it, bringing into question the whole idea of what a sonnet is, or could be. I have treated it in some places as a lyric fourteener, with rhymes, in one place as an unrhymed quatorzeine; I have in some places argued by octave and sestet, in others ignored the distinction; I have used disyllabic rhyme, internal rhyme and pararhyme (half-rhyme, slant rhyme). I have not yet started to use designed schemes of alliteration, but that may well come. In short, Willie, I am pushing the envelope, as the current jargon goes, and waiting to see how it crumples. “Sonnets



A matter of versifying 

from the Wilderness” has two concerns: (a) the isolation-in-mind, the exilic state of a bookish man, and (b) a reaching, half-resisted, desperately felt, for religious commitment. I do not mean to suggest that a man as outgoing and interactive (in several languages) as you, must ever feel isolated; and as for God, you are far too young, at the age of sixty, to be thinking about any such thing (I paraphrase Mistress Quickly). I hope, though, that you will recognize my voice and gesture in these poems, and take some pleasure in doing so. Have a happy, blessed, birthday, Willie. Tot siens. Bill. SONNETS FROM THE WILDERNESS (a draft: for Willie van Peer) I Not sleeping well; the summer nights are bad, bed has no comfort for the bones, it seems; but worse, these fretful unforgiving dreams fraught with misgivings; I am old and sad. At seven I’m up; let in the Siamese bawling his need to be adored and fed; make tea; consider going back to bed then can’t be bothered. Stirred by the morning breeze, fronds of Canary palm arrest the light breaking out over the hill behind. I bless the bluetits perching on my breakfast tray. Serene tomorrow issues from last night, provisional heaven and earth begin their day. Hail, Holy Light. Good morning, Wilderness [“Hail, Holy Light” – see Milton, Paradise Lost, Bk. III, line 1.; “Canary palm”, Phoenix canariensis, a native to the islands; I have two in my garden. This is a quatorzaine, a “fourteener”, with sonnet-rhymes but no octave-sestet pattern; a sequence of remarks, rather] II Not like those ragged cliffs, that tangled steep of stone and shale and poorgrass where a saint might scramble in an ecstasy, and faint for want of bread, or mazed for lack of sleep, blunder his destined way to paradise, a holy man gone crazy by design – in no such wilderness I wander; mine’s a strange glass-flowering tract behind the eyes, a garden of abstractions where the fruit

 Walter Nash

is artificial, taste a paradigm of appetising structures, nothing real; no ground footprinted by the sturdy brute, a blank half-acre of the mere ideal, a loneliness I till, to pass the time. [“those ragged cliffs”, the enormous Acantilado de los Gigantes, presiding loftily over the end of the street where I live: “poorgrass”, meaning “scrub”, a word I invented to ease the metre; Poorgrass is actually the name of a rustic character in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge: “till”, as in “cultivate”. There is no volta at line 8–9. The sense runs unbroken in two long sentences, from line 1–7, and from 7–14] III We bookish men, confiding in the mind, soon lose the confidence of what we mean; thought-galleries are darker than a mine and every pitfall makes a breach to mend; in daily rigour each one works his stint at thesis, doctorate, edition, tract, into this pious torment they are tricked – hard labour, hardly better than a stunt to have a fellowship, a high degree, a reputation among “them that know”, a senseless sense of being an elite; when recognition comes, it comes too late, too late the honoured scarlet, nothing’s new in no-man’s-land; the common wear is grey. [On intellectual isolation – and vanity: the innovation here is the use of halfrhyme throughout, echoing the mood of uncertainty, frustration, incompleteness; “stint at thesis, &c”, cp. the miner’s allotted daily stint at the coalface; “stunt”, as in “spectacular trick”; “them that know”, echoing Dante on Aristotle, Il Maestro di color che sanno, “The Master of them that know”, Inferno, iv, 131] IV But when the sea comes hero-vaulting over the harbour wall hurling up crests and canopies of spray, or when it lies, languid and tinsel-threaded in the bay, something might be attempted, after all, something not done with “do”, when simply “be” springs a surprise.



A matter of versifying 

The world I see glimmering at me with its droll blue gaze begging a poem, coming to me for food, trances me sometimes with its artless ways; then suddenly wilderness softens into solitude. [A totally innovative “fourteener” with octave and sestet in lyric form, not sonnetform; “arguing”, however, like a conventional sonnet; “the sea”, “the harbour”, “the bay”, like “those ragged cliffs” in sonnet II, features I see every day, markers of my “world”, not my “wilderness”] V The accidence of nature, the small cues clenching creation’s syntax show me how a pattern is evolving even now. “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” God’s poem is in the making, and yet – whose design is here, whose eye construes the text? Reader, read on, spell out what happens next; and still blind reason says, there is no God. No God exists, because no God can be held in the labouring mind’s prolixity, juggling incessantly with hope and fear, finding nor rest nor reason to rejoice in any certainty, until a voice says gently to the heart, “But I am here”. [“accidence”, as in grammar, but punning casually on “accidents”: the rhymescheme in the octave is unusual, a-b-b-c/a-d-d-c; I mark the volta here, the transition to the sestet, where “But I am here” answers the octave’s repeated “There is no God”] VI To church I go, and break out in a rage; “they manacle the sinner with their cant, they fill the hungry with their naked want, fears they inspire, in order to assuage, doubts they provoke, in order to remove faults they impute, in order to forgive, hell they imply, in order to reprieve, then speak incomprehensibly of love.”

 Walter Nash

“And what is wilderness, compared to this? here is a comely falsehood, a sweet show a Punch and Judy pitched at heaven’s gate.” But as I speak, with cackling emphasis, a voice in me says “wait, and you will know; come in; be still; prepare for nothing; wait.” [A turning point in the set, this marks abeginning of a religious experience: “break out in a rage” – cp “break out in a sweat”, “break out in a rash”; also “break out from”, “escape from (punitive) restraint”. In mundane fact, I had been to church and came home in a temper. “Punch and Judy”, a marionette show for children, Kasperleteater, my mockery of Anglo-Catholic ritual. The last three lines remind me of George Herbert, but I cannot cite the parallel] VII Waiting is what humans do; we are wired for it. Flowers are not patient; tolerant only of the sun’s periodic attentions, they open and shut without giving it a thought; and my cat, Frank, (the Siamese) can’t wait, won’t wait, he wants his cuddle or chickenbits NOW, he cancels time when he blinks his eyes; as for the bluetits, time is the nanosecond between migrations. But we are different; we know how to wait for justice, or revenge, or love, or change. Patience we have – of all the things we do humans can “do waiting” – it’s our talent, also our tragedy; hung on the blind event, all the bells toll for us – abide, abide. [Totally innovative – a sonnet without rhyme, and in the language and rhythms of prose or conversation; a freeverse fourteener, but with a differentiated octave and sestet. Frank the Siamese, and the bluetits, are from sonnet I. “All the bells toll” in the last line is an accidental reminiscence of Donne’s “for whom the bell tolls”] VIII It’s hard to abide myself; I am so weak I cannot sleep for waking, and my bones practise the craft of aching; when I speak I squeak, or munch in demi-semitones. Hearing has quit my service, and my sight betrays the light, the vision’s blurred and small, and none too tall to wage a losing fight.



A matter of versifying 

I try to stand, knowing I have to fall. And always wearying for a gift of grace to help me leave my foolishness behind, the mirror knows the worry in my face. I hear the gentle murmur in my mind – “for all the days amiss, the doing marred, accept your life – if soul remain unscarred.” [In the octave, a frolic of internal rhymes, playful in the misery of old age. This is the only sonnet of the set to use the “clinching sestet”] IX A little, a little at a time, take it steady now, a little to walk on the flat, a little to climb as you are ready now, walk slowly, but walk with deliberate tread towards the next turn, you may never see happenings that lie ahead, but they concern you. Don’t doubt it, never begrudge this march towards mystery swaddled in sackcloth at the far end of the story; think, how tremendously little by little, we trudge the undiscovered path, the gangway to glory. [As in nr. V, this replaces the conventional sonnet form with the idea of the lyric; octave and seset are like the introduction and refrain of a theatrical song – but they remain octave and sestet; “gangway” – as “walkway”, not as “gangplank” (!)] X Walk out into the world of heaven’s making; paths that the prophets trod – the holy men, the very elect of God – they are still yours for the taking. Make no provision for the fret of living think that necessities are placed wherever is need in the unrelenting waste. God is forever giving and forgiving. Even the wilderness you yourself created, a Fatherly omniscience invades.

 Walter Nash

In all the cities of bleak memory garrisons of the Ghost are concentrated, Christ saunters on the fractured esplanades, the paper shops sell maps of Galilee. [An attempt at serenity, “relaxation”; lines of irregular length; rhymes balancing feminine and masculine, e.g., “making-trod-God-taking”, “living-placed-wasteforgiving”. The sestet invokes the Trinity; “cities of bleak memory”, episodes of life that sees empty and meaningless in recollections (or dreams)]

References Baugh, A.C. (ed.). 1950. A Literary History of England. London: Routledge. Chambers, E.K. 1933. Sir Thomas Wyatt and some Collected Studies. London: Sidgwick & Jackson. Eliot, T.S. 1942[1957]. The music of poetry. In On Poetry and Poets, 26–38. London: Faber. Graves, R. 1955. The Crowning Privilege: The Clark Lectures 1954–55. London: Cassell & Co. Hollander, J. and Kermode, F. (eds). 1973. The Oxford Anthology of English Literature. Vol. II: The Literature of Renaissance England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Silkin, J. 1997. The Life of Metrical and Free Verse in Twentieth Century Poetry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Van Peer, W. 1996. Canon formation: Ideology or aesthetic quality? The British Journal of Aesthetics 36(2): 97–108.

About the contributors

Anna Chesnokova is Associate Professor at the Translation Department of Kyiv National Linguistic University, Ukraine, where she was Head of the English Philology Chair for three years. She is moderator of the Ukrainian chapter of edis (Emily Dickinson International Society). She has an M.A. in English and French Philology from Kyiv National Linguistic University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University. She has published on cognitive poetics, stylistics and literary awareness and has been one of the coordinators of the international redes Project since 2003. Her specific research interest is Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Recently, she has started her post-doc on poetic awareness. Arthur C. Graesser is Full Professor in the Department of Psychology and coDirector of the Institute for Intelligent Systems at the University of Memphis. He has worked in several areas of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and discourse processing, including text comprehension, inference generation, conversation, question asking and answering, tutoring, and advanced learning environments. He is currently Associate Editor of the journal Discourse Processes, was Senior Editor of the 2003 Handbook of Discourse Processes, and the next Editor of Journal of Educational Psychology. He has designed and tested cutting edge software in learning, language, and discourse technologies, including AutoTutor and Coh-Metrix. Bill Louw is Chair of the English Department of the University of Zimbabwe. His main interest lies in the area of stylistics. He effectively started corpus stylistics as a discipline by publishing the first article in this area in 1987. His work with John Sinclair in the area of semantic prosodies has led to his current interest in the interface between collocation, truth and the philosophy of language. He believes that collocation is nascent instrumentation for language and that its use as instrumentation will either automate or falsify linguistic theories and schools of thought. Bin Zhang received his undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics and his M.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering from The University of Memphis. He is currently pursuing an M.Sc. degree in Computer Science at the University of Memphis. His current research interests are in computational linguistics and language generation.

 Directions in Empirical Literary Studies

Brent Morgan is a doctoral student in the Institute for Intelligent Systems at the University of Memphis. His general interests are in cognitive science, with specific research in the areas of intelligent tutoring systems, animated conversational agents, and learning environments with automated natural language comprehension. He has conducted research with Coh-Metrix, AutoTutor, aries, and other systems with natural language technologies. Colin Martindale received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University in 1970 and a Doctorate Honoris Causa from the Université Catholique de Louvain in 1988. He is currently Honorary Professor of Psychology and Art at the Perm State Institute of Arts and Culture (Russia) and Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Maine. He has served as President of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics and of the Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts. He has received numerous awards for his over 200 books, articles, and chapters on creativity and quantitative studies of art and literature. David L. Hoover is Professor of English at New York University, where he teaches stylistics, English language, and Humanities computing. His publications in stylistics and Humanities computing include three books – A New Theory of Old English Meter, Language and Style in The Inheritors, and Stylistics: Prospect and Retrospect – and numerous articles on authorship attribution and corpus and computational stylistics. Active in Humanities computing for more than twenty-five years, he was elected Vice President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities in 2006. He is currently co-editing an electronic scholarly edition of Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, and writing a book on chronological changes in authorial style using corpus and computational methods. David S. Miall is Professor of English at the University of Alberta in Canada. Previous publications include, as Editor, Humanities and the Computer: New Directions (1990), Romanticism: The CD-ROM (1997), and a monograph, Literary Reading: Empirical and Theoretical Studies (2006). He specializes in literature of the British Romantic period, and the empirical study of literary reading – a field in which he has collaborated with Don Kuiken (Department of Psychology) since 1990. He teaches courses in Romantic literature, Gothic fiction, literary computing, and empirical and historical studies of literary reading. Donald C. Freeman is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Southern California and co-Director of the Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts in Heath, Massachusetts, USA. He has published widely in stylistics, metrics, and cognitive metaphor, and was Editor-in-Chief of pala Papers, a series of volumes published for the Poetics and Linguistics Association. In 1971 Freeman founded



About the contributors 

the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he remains an Adjunct Professor. Freeman edited two volumes of essays in stylistics: Linguistics and Literary Style (1970) and Essays in Modern Stylistics (1981). Don Kuiken holds a Ph.D. and is a psychologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, specializing in the study of dreams, aesthetics, and phenomenology. He has published a number of journal articles and book chapters concerning self-transformation through significant dreams, aesthetic experience, and intensive self-reflection. His current research addresses shifts in the sense of self that can sometimes occur through literary reading and as a result of impactful dreams, especially following loss or trauma. Geoff Hall is Head of Applied Linguistics at Swansea University, Wales, U.K. and Assistant Editor for the journal Language and Literature. Research interests are language in education and literary stylistics. Recent publications include Literature in Language Education (Basingstoke: Palgrave 2005), ‘Literature as a social practice’ (in The Art of English. Literary Creativity, S. Goodman and K. O’ Halloran (eds). Basingstoke: Palgrave 2006), and ‘Stylistics in second language contexts’ (in G. Watson and S. Zyngier eds. Literature and Stylistics, Basingstoke: Palgrave 2006). Ildikó Somogyváry graduated from the University of Pécs where she is currently a part-time Ph.D. student. Her research interests include clinical psychology and narrative psychology with particular emphasis on empathic processes. She is a part-time Assistant Professor in Psychology at the Eötvös College, Baja. Jan Auracher is a lecturer at the University of Munich, where he gives introductory courses in empirical methodology and statistical analysis in intercultural studies. He studied German as a Foreign Language, computer science, and neurobiology at the University of Munich, Germany, and during as well as after his studies he has been a teacher of German in Japan, Korea, and Canada. His doctoral work was on psychophysiological measurements of reactions to suspense. Currently he is involved in validating computer based text analysis through the observation of psychological and bio-psychological reader response. In addition, he is engaged in a comparative study of German and Japanese information processing, regarding reading as well as writing. Jan Prasil is a student of political science, philosophy and Germanic studies at the University of Munich. He holds his B.A. in political science from Charles University, Prague. His work examined the post-modern concepts of power in international relations. His main academic interests are post-modern readings of world

 Directions in Empirical Literary Studies

politics and intercultural hermeneutics. He has been a member of the Association for International Affairs in Prague since 2006. János László is Professor of Social Psychology at the Institute for Psychology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest and the University of Pécs, where he is currently Head of the Institute of Psychology and of the Doctoral School in Psychology. He has been Visiting Professor at several North-American and European universities. His major research interest is psychology of narratives. His books include Cognition and Representation in Literature (Akadémia: Budapest) and The Science of Stories (Routledge: London). Jèmeljan Hakemulder has a background in literary theory and comparative literature. For his Ph.D. he specialized in the Psychology of Literature, focusing on the effects of reading literary texts on self-concept and social perception (The Moral Laboratory. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2000, supervised by Fokkema and Van Peer). He now teaches psychology of media and the arts at Utrecht University, and trains students in the Humanities in research methods of the social sciences. In his research he looks at reception of film (e.g., response to foregrounding, and adaptation), but also still takes an interest in the effects of literary stories. Keith Oatley is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Human Development and Applied Psychology, University of Toronto. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a Fellow of the British Psychological Society. His research is on the psychology of emotions and the psychology of imaginative literature. He is the author or co-author of some 150 journal articles and chapters, and six books on psychology. He is also author of two novels, one of which, The case of Emily V., won the 1994 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Novel. Maciej Maryl is an assistant lecturer at the Institute for Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw) and a Ph.D. student at the Graduate School for Social Research (Warsaw). He graduated with distinction from Warsaw University in sociology (2007) and literature (2006). His Ph.D. project is aimed at describing the role of literature in the context of new media. He works for a scientific journal Teksty Drugie. He also translates articles of such authors as Mieke Bal or Claire Cavanagh. His research interests include literature to everyday life and qualitative approaches to empirical studies of literature. Maria Dudusova is a student of Germanic studies, English linguistics and literary studies at the University of Munich, Germany. She has recently finished her B.A. Her academic interests are modern American literature and linguistic pragmatics.



About the contributors 

Marisa Bortolussi is Full Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. She has an M.A. in comparative literature from Carleton University, and a Ph.D. in Spanish from Laval University. Her areas of specialization include literary theory, modern narrative, Hispanic literature, and comparative literature. For the past thirteen years she has been engaged in a collaborative, interdisciplinary research program with Dr. Peter Dixon of the Psychology Department at the University of Alberta. In this research they apply the methods of cognitive psychology to the study of literary response. Together they published Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Maja Djikic is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Marcel Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, having recently completed a period of work as a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Psychology Department, Harvard University. Her research is on the effects of art on the transformation of personality. She has published in Creativity Research Journal, Personality and Individual Differences, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, and elsewhere. Mariya Sergeyeva has an M.A. in English and German Philology from Kyiv National Linguistic University. During student years, she was the Head of unesco Student’s Club and one of the co-founders of redes-Ukraine in 2003. Since then she has helped to organize 4 annual redes conferences in Kyiv and herself participated in 8 international conferences in Germany, Spain, France, Morocco, Poland, promoting redes ideas and presenting her research. In 2007, she contributed to Acting and Connecting: Cultural Approaches to Language and Literature, edited by Sonia Zyngier, Anna Chesnokova, and Vander Viana. Max M. Louwerse is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Institute for Intelligent Systems at the University of Memphis. He received M.A. degrees in language and literature from the University of Utrecht and a Ph.D. degree in linguistics from the University of Edinburgh. He has published over 70 articles in a variety of journals and proceedings, co-edited (with Willie van Peer) an interdisciplinary volume on thematics and received awards for his teaching and research. His interests cover a wide range of topics in interdisciplinary research related to computational psycholinguistics, including text and discourse comprehension and production and multimodal communication. Michael Kimmel is a researcher based at the University of Vienna, Austria. He holds an M.A. (1995) and a Ph.D. (2002) from Vienna University. His interests

 Directions in Empirical Literary Studies

comprehend cognitive linguistic methods of metaphor and image schema analysis, socio-cultural embodiment, cognitive narratology, as well as qualitative and mixed methods. In the recent years he has conducted research on metaphor in political discourse with qualitative software tools. Complementing earlier psycholinguistic work on sensorimotor resonance in reading, he is currently working with text-linguistic methods on imagery in literary cognition. From early 2008–10 he will conduct cognitive-ethnographic fieldwork on embodied imagery in tango, in a project that combines linguistic and phenomenological methods with motion analysis to explore dance class interactions and body learning. In the past, Kimmel has been member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Advanced Studies, Vienna and the University of Economics, Vienna, and he has worked as a freelance researcher in Vienna, Budapest, and Berlin. Milena Mendes holds an M.A. in applied linguistics. Currently, she is working towards her Ph.D. in language studies at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. She has been a member of the redes group since its beginning, which has contributed to her academic background. Her interests include research on teaching English as a foreign language, corpus linguistics and the influence of technology on educational settings. Natália Silveira holds a B.A. in English and Portuguese language and literature from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She has been a member of the redes Research Group since 2004 and published articles in the fields of text linguistics and computational stylistics. Nick Benesh is a postgraduate student at the University of Memphis in the Psychology Department and the Institute for Intelligent Systems. He is currently in the Ph.D. program. His research interests primarily focus around vision and how it is used in various multimodal settings. More recently his interests have included spatial visual processes and visual plasticity in transferring from video game environments to real world environments. Olivia Fialho is a Ph.D. student in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Alberta, Canada. She has completed an M.A. with distinction in applied linguistics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She is a member of igel and of redes. Her most recent publications include contributions to Literature and Stylistics for Language Learners (2007), edited by Greg Watson and Sonia Zyngier, and to the special issue on foregrounding in Language and Literature (2007). Her Ph.D. project is an interdisciplinary study of self-modification in literary response. Her research interests include the empirical study of literary reception, modernist fiction, and literary awareness.



About the contributors 

Paul Sopčák holds an M.A. in English literature from the University of Munich, Germany, and is currently pursuing a doctoral degree (abd) in comparative literature at the University of Alberta, Canada. He is a Killam Scholar whose academic interests include the empirical study of literature, early modernist English literature, and Latin American literature. He has published on readers’ responses to stylistic features in drafts to James Joyce’s Ulysses, on responses to depictions of violence in Latin American literary texts, and on intertextuality in Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines. Peter Dixon earned his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1979. After a two-year post-doctoral position at Bell Laboratories, he moved to the University of Alberta where he has been since. He has published broadly in cognitive psychology, including research in areas such as word recognition, discourse processing, working memory, visual attention, visual perception, motor control, and statistical methods. With Marisa Bortolussi, he has co-authored Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response. Previously, he has served as Editor of the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology and as Associate Editor of Memory & Cognition.  Raymond A. Mar is an Assistant Professor at York University in the Department of Psychology. His work has appeared in various journals including Neuropsychologia, Journal of Research in Personality, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Perspectives on Psychological Science, and in the book Empathy and Fairness (Wiley & Sons). The central topic of his research is the simulation of social experience afforded by fictional narratives such as literature, cinema, and theatre. Sonia Zyngier is Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She holds a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics (University of Birmingham). In her thesis, she developed the concept of literary awareness, which has since been validated in different countries, and published widely. Her latest publications include Muses and Measures: Empirical Research Methods for the Humanities (2007), in collaboration with Willie van Peer and Jèmeljan Hakemulder, Acting and Connecting: Cultural Approaches to Language and Literature (2007), edited with Anna Chesnokova and Vander Viana, and Literature and Stylistics for Language Learners (2006), edited with Greg Watson. She has also written on pedagogical stylistics for the Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2006). Uri Margolin is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. His main areas of research and publication are literary theory and methodology, narrative studies (including possible worlds

 Directions in Empirical Literary Studies

semantics and cognitive approaches) and Slavic formalism, structuralism and semiotics. Publications to date include close to 70 essays in collective volumes and professional journals. His association and friendship with Willie van Peer go back many years to van Peer’s first visit to Edmonton. Vander Viana holds a B.A. in English language and literature from the State University of Rio de Janeiro and is currently doing postgraduate work at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. Since 2003 he has been a member of the redes Research Group. He has co-edited five volumes of collected works and published articles on corpus linguistics, English language and distance learning. Acting and Connecting: Cultural Approaches to Language and Literature (2007), edited in collaboration with Sonia Zyngier and Anna Chesnokova, is among his latest publications. Vladimir Yepishev graduated from Kyiv National Linguistic University with Specialist Degree in translation and interpretation (English and German). In 2006, he joined the Ukrainian redes Group, and presented a paper on Tolkien’s novels at the redes Conference in 2007. He is currently working on a new project on sound symbolism. He has published an article entitled “Dwarfs and Hobbits in Ukrainian Translations.” Walter Nash is Emeritus Professor of English Language, University of Nottingham. Since his retirement in 1991 he has lived for long periods in Tenerife. His main occupation of late has been writing verse, e.g., Of Time and Small Islands (a book about landscapes, histories, myths) and In Good Faith (a collection of devotional poems). A memoir of a childhood in the 1930s, For Old Times Sake has been published recently. His academic interests since retirement have been mainly in Anglo-Saxon poetry: a book of translations and commentaries, A Departed Music, has been published, and a second volume is in preparation. He is 82, badly balanced, and blest with a very patient wife. Yeshayahu Shen is Associate Professor in cognitive studies of language in the Department of Poetics & Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University. His main areas of research are story grammars, discourse comprehension, figurative language comprehension, cognitive poetics, metaphor and conceptual structure, and literary theory. Some of his recent publications appeared in Journal of Memory and Language, Discourse Processes, Cognitive Linguistics, Poetics, TEXT, Journal of Pragmatics, Language and Literature, Journal of Literary Semantics, Empirical Study of the Arts and Poetics Today. He is on the board of Metaphor and Symbol, and is a contributor to the Hebrew Encyclopedia as well as Elsevier’s Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics.

Index of authors

A Abelson, R.P.  141 Abu-Assad, H.  139, 140 Allan, S.  301 Allen, J.  150, 178 Anderson, B.  77, 114, 318 Andringa, E.  114 Aristotle  338 Astington, J.W.  131 Auracher, J.  xii, 268 B Baayen, R.H.  164 Bakhtin, M.M.  23, 24, 28 Balaban, N.  64 Banfield, A.  23, 24, 31 Bard, E.  178 Batelaan, P.  286 Benesh, N.  158, 175 Berlyne, D.E.  230, 234 Biber, D.  162, 163 Black, J.  114, 299, 300, 302, 305, 306 Bogen, J.E.  234 Boonthum, C.  162 Booth, W.C.  14, 114 Borkum, J.  231 Bortolussi, M.  xii, 9, 10, 25, 29, 31, 32, 71, 78, 80, 81 Bourdieu, P.  8 Bourg, T.  144 Bower, G.H.  114, 286 Branscombe, N.R.  118 Bray, J.  23, 28, 29, 30, 32 Brewer, M.B.  116 Brock, T.C.  131, 133, 143, 150, 324 Brown, R.J.  116 Bruner, J.  234 Bryant, J.  149 Buckner, R.L.  131 Bunge, M.  3, 10 Burney, F.  29

Burrows, J.F.  211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 217 Busel, V.  287 C Cai, Z.  162, 165 Cantor, J.  150 Carminati, M.N.  83, 84 Carroll, D.C.  73, 131 Cassirer, E.  234 Chafe, W.L.  163, 178 Chambers, E.K.  332 Charness, N.  163 Charniak, E.  165 Chekhov, A.  104, 106, 109, 133, 134, 135, 177, 178, 180, 182, 184, 185 Chesnokova, A.  x, xii, 267, 268 Chisango, T.  117 Christianson, S.A.  286 Clark, H.H.  164 Cohn, D.  23 Coleridge, S.T.  58, 100 Collingwood, R.G.  50 Conrad, S.  162 Correll, J.  117 Coulson, S.  59 Crane, R.S.  17 Crossley, S.A.  177, 180, 183 Cupchik, G.C.  77 D Danaher, D.  194 Daniel, F.  162, 165 Darwin, C.  233 Darwin, E.  232 Davis, M.H.  115 Day, L.  117 de Waal, F.B.M.  115 dela Paz, J.  132 Demoulin, S.  117 Dennis, S.  162, 166, 177 Dickinson, E.  40, 186, 188

Dixon, P.  9, 10, 25, 29, 31, 32, 71, 75, 78, 80, 81 Djikic, M.  127, 134 Doan, T.  117 Dolezel, L.  17 Doosje, B.  118 Dovidio, J.F.  117 Downes, W.  194 Du Bois, J.W.  178 Dudusova, M.  268, 309 Dukewich, T.L.  54 Dumais, S.T.  177, 179 Dzyuba, I.  287 E Echols, L.D.  128 Eisenberg, N.  115 Eliot, G.  130, 178 Eliot, T.S.  158, 223, 330 Ellis, J.  37 Ellis, R.D.  52 Emmot, C.  25 Ericsson, K.A.  127, 163 F Fabb, N.  176 Fauconnier, G.  40 Faulstich, W.  114 Fauskanger, H.K.  302, 305 Fellbaum, C.  162, 164, 167 Feltovich, P.J.  163 Fialho, O.  73 Fidler, D.S.  130 Fiedler, K.  117 Fischer, M.H.  83 Flerx, V.C.  130 Fludernik  23, 24 Fortunati, V.  247 Fowler, R.  176, 188 Francis, M.E.  162, 164 Freeman, D.C.  4, 41 45, 194, 201 Freeman, M.H.  40

 Index of authors Freud, S.  234, 239 Frith, C.D.  131 Frith, U.  131 Fromm, E.  234, 239 Frost, R.  158 Frye, N.  8 Fülöp, É.  119 G Galinsky, A.D.  117 Garrod, S.  162 Gendlin, E.T.  4, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 59 Gerbner, G.  149 Gernsbacher, M.A.  162 Gerrig, R.J.  25, 114, 115, 324 Gibbs, R.W.  82, 194 Giertych, R.  317, 318 Glucksberg, S.  56, 57, 97 Godfrey, J.J.  178 Goh, S.T.  32 Goldman, S.  162 Goldstein, K.  234 Goldstein, T.  151 Goodman, N.  151 Graesser, A.C.  3, 25, 31, 158, 161, 162, 165, 167, 178 Graff, D.  178 Green, M.C.  131, 133, 143, 145, 150, 180, 324 Gregory, W.L.  143 Gross, L.  149 Gross, P.R.  38 H Hakemulder, J.  32, 72, 84, 103, 104, 109, 130, 131, 132, 133, 139, 141, 143, 145, 146, 148, 267 Hall, G.  3, 4, 17, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27, 32 Halliday, M.A.K.  165, 249, 258, 259 Harris, P.L.  131 Harrison, M.R.  128 Hart, M.  186 Hasan, R.  165 Hauptmeier, H.  8 Heal, J.  131 Heeman, P.A.  178 Heidegger, M.  51, 54 Hempfer, K.  17 Herder, J.G. von  318

Hillis-Miller, J.  318 Hirsh, J.  132 Hobbes, T.  234 Hoffman, R.R.  163 Hollander, J.  332 Holliman, E.  178 Hoover, D.L.  158 Hoppe, K.  239 Huizinga, J.  141 Hunt, R.A.  28, 31, 77 I Indurkhya, B.  57 Isen, A.M.  286 Iser, W.  4, 17 Ivanishin, V.  287 J Jakobson, R.  245, 248, 251, 258, 259 James, H.  83, 158, 197, 201, 205, 206 Janis, I.L.  142 Jefferson, A.  175 John, O.P.  117, 134, 180 Johnson, M.  196, 318 Jones, E.E.  114 Jung, C.G.  234 Jurafsky, D.  162, 166, 180 K Kant, I.  4 Keen, S.  115, 116, 123, 130 Kellogg, R.T.  163 Kennedy-Moore, E.  50 Kermode, F.  332 Kernan, A.B.  319 Kim, A.S.N.  132, 309 Kimmel, M.  158, 193, 194, 201 King, B.T.  188 Kintsch, W.  162, 164, 166, 167, 171, 177 Kist, O.  298 Klare, G.R.  164 Klinger, E.  234 Kohlberg, L.  141 Kotsina, I.  286 Köváriné Somogyvári, I.  116 Kozak, M.N.  117 Kreutz, R.  25, 31 Kris, E.  234 Krishnamurthy, R.  245, 261

Kuiken, D.  4, 71, 150 Kuno, S.  114 L Lakoff, G.  194, 196, 206 Landauer, T.K.  162, 166, 177, 179 Lappin, S.  166 Larsen, S.F.  114 László, J.  72, 114, 116, 119, 123 Lawrence, D.H.  23, 26, 27, 28, 31, 330 Leass, H.J.  166 Lee, K.M.  158 Leech, G.  23, 236 Leippe, M.  143 Lenat, D.B.  162 Lentricchia, F.  39 Leung, C.  150 Levinstein, I.  162 Levkovska, N.  285 Lévy–Bruhl, L.  234 Lewis, G.  180, 181, 183, 189 Leyens, J.Ph.  116, 117, 123 Liu, J.H.  116 Lodge, D.  26 Louw, W.E.  159, 176 Louwerse, M.M.  xi, 10, 158, 162, 165, 175, 177, 178, 180, 181, 183, 189 Lu, S.  162 Luckmann, T.  321 Ludwig, H.W.  114 M Maat, P.  71, 84, 114, 115, 127, 130 Magliano, J.P.  162, 167 Malinowski, B.  247, 248, 252, 253, 258 Mann, K.  120, 181, 184 Manning, C.D.  180 Mansfield, K.  60, 61, 71, 89, 90, 91, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100 Manstead, A.S.R.  118 Mar, R.A.  72, 127, 130, 131, 132, 133 Margolin, U.  3, 4, 7, 12 Martin, J.H.  162, 166, 180 Martindale, A.E.  239 Martindale, C.  158, 229, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239

Index of authors  Maryl, M.  268, 317, 320, 321, 324 Maslow, A.H.  234 Maurenen, A.  260 McCarthy, P.M.  162 McHale, B.  22, 29 McKellar, P.  234 McNamara, D.S.  162, 164, 166, 171, 177 Mead, G.H.  115 Melville, H.  158, 205, 206 Mendes, M.  269 Merleau-Ponty, M.  51, 52, 55 Meyer, C.  178 Miall, D.S.  71, 72, 150, 157 Miles, J.  197, 200, 236 Mill, J.S.  77 Millis, K.  162 Mitchell, H.H.  162 Mitchell, H.R.  128 Moore, K.  231 Morgan, B.  158, 161 Morrison, B.  246 Moskowitz, G.B.  117 Muka ovasjý, J.  55, 89, 106, 230, 233, 273 Mukhtar, S.  145 N Neisser, U.  234 Nietzsche, F.  234 Nisbett, R.W.  114 Noordman, L.G.M.  165 Nussbaum, M.  144 O Oatley, K.  72, 77, 127, 129, 130, 132, 134 Olson, D.R.  131 Owens, J.  114 P Paladino, P.M.  117 Palmer, A.  150 Palmer, F.  141, 142 Panksepp, J.  52 Pascal, R.  23 Pennebaker, J.W.  162, 164 Peterson, J.B.  132, 134 Petrov, V.M.  234 Pfister, M.  17 Phillips, L.  63 Piaget, J.  115, 234

Pichert, J.W.  114 Pickering, M.J.  162 Piepenbrock, R.  164 Pina, A.  117 Podobed, K.  286 Popper, K.R.  ix, 9 Postman, L.  77 Powell, B.  128, 309, 310 Prasil, J.  268, 309 Preiss, R.W.  150 Preobrazhenskaya, A.  286 Preston, S.D.  115 Prince, G.  108, 113 R Radevych-Vynnizkiy, Y.  287 Radvansky, G.A.  162, 167 Radway, J.  317, 319, 320, 323, 324, 325 Reinhart, T.  103, 105, 108 Reppen, R.  162 Richards, I.A.  49, 62 Riffaterre, M.  252 Ritterfeld, U.  141 Roberts A.M.  83 Roberts, B.W.  134 Robey, D.  175 Robinson, E.A.  158, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 225 Rodríguez, P.A.  117 Rodríguez, T.R.  117 Rogers, R.W.  130 Roitblat, H.L.  32 Ron, M.  25 Rorty, R.  142 Ross, A.  37 Ross, C.S.  134 Ross, P.E.  128 Rowe, J.A.  180 Rusch, G.  8, 9 Russel, R.  117 S Sabine, G.  133 Sabine, P.  133 Sandburg, C.  158, 223, 225 Sanders, T.J.M.  165 de Saussure, F.  8, 36 Saxe, R.  131 Schank, R.C.  141 Schmidt, S.J.  xi, 3, 7, 8 Schramm, D.  114 Schreier, M.  27

Schutz, A.  321, 322 Schutze, H.  180 Semin, G.R.  117 Semino, E.  27, 32 Senders, V.L.  77 Sergeyeva, M.  268, 283 Seyffert, P.  16 Shabtai, Y.  106 Shaizhin, A.  286 Shakespeare, W.  4, 35, 42, 43, 44, 178, 181, 245, 331, 334, 335 Shen, Y.  71, 72 Shklovsky, V. (or Šklovskij, V.)  230, 272 Shlonsky, A.  109 Short, M.H.  23, 24, 27, 32 Siddiqui, S.  129 Silkin, J.  x Simpson, P.  211 Sinclair, J.M.  176 Singer, M.  167 Slezko, V.  286 Soetaert, R.  x Sokal, A.  35ff Sommer, R.  309 Sopcák, P.  55, 85 Sotirova, V.  23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32 Spears, R.  118 Spreng, R.N.  132 Srivastava, S.  134 Stabler, J.  83 Stanovich, K.E.  128, 129 Steedman.M.  178 Steen, G.  3, 194 Stevens,  158, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 225 Stockwell, P.  194 Stolnitz, J.  53 Stone, P.J.  229, 240 Stoudenets’, G.I.  302 Strange, J.  150, 222, 330 Strayer, J.  115 Stubbs, M.  176 T Taine, H.  233 Takahashi, S.  32 Tannen, D.  163 Taylor, L.J.  162 Tellegen, S.  150

 Index of authors Thompson, S.A.  103, 105, 178 Titshall, L.  117 Titzmann, M.  12 Tolkien, J.R.R.  298, 299, 300, 302, 303, 304, 307 Tonkonogy, A.  63 Toolan, M.  23 Tourangeau, R.  57 Trabasso, T.  167 Turner, M.  194, 206 Tynjanov, J.  230, 233 U Uspensky, B.A.  114 V Van der Zee, R.  145, 146 Van Peer, W.  xi, xii, 3, 10, 17, 21, 23, 24, 28, 32, 55, 71, 83, 84, 85, 89, 92, 99, 103, 104, 109, 114, 115, 123, 127, 130, 135, 142, 150, 151, 158, 161, 162, 163, 168, 169, 170, 171, 175, 176, 177, 183, 184, 187, 190, 211, 229, 267, 268, 272, 335, 336.

Verbitsky, M.  63 Verdonk, P.  29 Viana, V.  x, 159, 267, 268 Vico, G.  234 Viechtbauer, W.  134 Viki, T.G.  117 Vincze, O.  116, 119 Vipond, D.  77 Voloshinov, V.  23 Vorderer, P.  77 W Wagner, R.K.  128 Walton, K.E.  134 Watson, G.  272 Watson, J.C.  50 Weber, J.J.  245 Weber, R.  141 Werner, H.  234, 239 Werth, P.  17, 25 West, A.  239 West, R.F.  128, 129 Wexler, A.  131 Wiebe, J.  113 Winchester, L.  117 Winner, E.  151

Wittgenstein, L.  39, 248, 253, 257, 258, 260, 261 Wolf, W.  17 Wolfe, T.  29 Wu, J.  180, 181, 183, 189 Wundt, W.  234 Y Yepishev, V.  268, 297 Z Zajonc, R.B.  231 Zane, J.P.  177, 180, 186 Zhang, B.  158, 175 Zhirmunskii, V.  11 Zholkovsky, A.  60 Zimbardo, P.  143 Zoeterman, S.  134 Zunshine, L.  130, 150 Zwaan, R.A.  26, 31, 77, 162, 167 Zyngier, S.  x, xii, 10, 32, 84, 267, 268

Index of keywords

A absorption  99, 139, 150 aesthetic  50ff, 84, 85, 99, 100, 104, 105, 109, 118, 161, 175, 189, 206, 226, 230ff, 272, 319, 335 see also aesthetic feeling  (see feeling) analogue (digital vs. analogue)  243ff ATLAS  193ff B bigram analysis  175, 180ff C canon  x, 13, 15, 268, 317ff, 335 (non-)canonical  271ff, 320, 327 changes in personality   (see personality change) character(s)(literary character)  22ff, 45, 58, 60, 62, 77, 79, 80ff, 90ff, 109, 113ff, 130ff, 139ff, 184, 188, 201, 212, 236, 303, 308, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 148, 150, 151, 180, 202, 268, 338 see also characteristic (also personality, traits)  x, 50, 76 cognition  8, 93, 100, 162, 177, 194, 197, 234ff see also cognitive  15, 40, 41, 43, 114, 115, 116, 127, 129, 131, 183, 196, 199, 204, 325 cognitive linguistics    (see linguistics) cognitive metaphor    (see metaphor) social cognition  114, 131, 139ff

coherence  80, 161ff, 193 cohesion  161ff, 193, 194, 203, 204 Coh-Metrix  161ff collocation  243ff, 274 complexity  4, 21, 24, 44, 51, 57, 59, 79ff, 87, 135, 163, 165, 168, 170, 205, 207, 230, 232, 237, 238, 333 computational  223, 226, 246, 249 see also computational linguistics    (see linguistics) computational stylistics    (see stylistics) conceptual metaphor    (see metaphor) context  7ff, 21, 22, 31, 55, 61, 75, 77, 81, 82, 87, 100, 101, 110, 132, 161, 166, 167, 176, 177, 193ff, 213, 239, 245ff, 273, 309, 311, 321, 329, 335 corpus (corpora)  15, 159, 163, 166, 168, 177ff, 194, 211ff, 246ff corpus analysis  15, 161ff, 208, 212 corpus-attested glossary  159, 243, 259 corpus linguistics    (see linguistics) corpus stylistics    (see style) correlational analysis  180 cultural studies  (see studies) D Deconstructivism see also deconstruction    35ff, 175, 189 radically   deconstructed  50

de-lexicalisation  (see lexical) deviation  103ff, 238, 251, 271, 272 discourse  7ff, 21ff, 35, 46, 86, 93, 94, 104, 107, 110, 162ff, 189, 194, 195, 200, 271, 274, 336 see also discourse   analysis  26, 103ff free indirect   discourse  90ff E emotion  30, 41, 51ff, 77, 93ff, 113ff, 131, 134, 141, 171, 197, 202, 209, 232, 253, 286, 311, 317ff see also laws of   emotion  89ff empathy  23, 24, 28, 30, 96, 109, 113ff, 127ff, 144, 150, 151 empirical  ixff, 7ff, 21ff, 35, 37, 57, 64, 83, 86, 90, 116, 127, 130, 132, 159, 161, 162, 163, 189, 226, 236, 243ff, 278 see also empirical study  (see study) empirical stylistics   (see style) entropy  229, 232, 238 episode  90, 91, 92, 96, 97, 100 see also episodic   structure  89, 91 ethnographic  21, 25, 29, 30, 32 see also ethnographic   research   (see research) experiment  xi, 7ff, 21ff, 75ff, 116, 141, 194, 229, 231 see also experimental manipulation    (see manipulation)

 Index of keywords expertise  37, 39, 127, 133, 163, 164, 170 see also literary reading expertise  27, 76, 77 psychology of expertise    (see psychology) extratextual   (see manipulation) F fear  52, 97, 98, 100, 101, 197, 202, 222, 309ff feeling  49ff, 89ff, 115, 119, 197, 310, 311, 320 see also aesthetic feeling  54ff foregrounding  xi, 44, 49, 71ff, 78, 89ff, 103ff, 127, 175, 176, 189, 271ff, 346, 348 see also ForegroundBackground  103ff, 272, 273 foregrounded  55, 57, 58, 78, 89 G genre  7, 11, 12, 40, 123, 132, 151, 161, 162, 168, 175ff, 194, 204, 205, 231, 246, 254, 273, 334 see also subgenre  83, 84 H habituation  231ff I IGEL  xii, 157, 160, 162, 171 identification  29, 49, 57, 60ff, 72, 81, 98, 109, 113ff, 150 image schemata  193ff imagination  50, 55, 139ff, 216, 220, 225 see also imagining   scenario  141 inference(s) 76, 83, 85, 86 infrahumanization  113, 116ff interdisciplinary  x, xi, 35ff,  36, 38, 39, 40, 161 Iota  211ff

L language  9, 23ff, 36, 40ff, 84, 86, 96, 98, 103, 104, 108, 110, 128, 129, 140, 161ff, 176ff, 200, 205, 213, 216, 244ff, 272ff, 282ff, 297ff, 312, 329, 337, 340 see also language  learning  249, 283ff Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA)  166, 170, 175ff laws of emotion  (see emotion) lexical  24, 104, 166, 222, 297, 298, 300 see also de-  lexicalisation  243ff lexical bundles  271ff lexical density  271, 273 lexical items  180ff lexical variety  268, 271ff  lexicography  243, 248 re-lexicalisation  243ff linguistics  x, xi, 7, 16, 22ff, 36ff, 103ff, 117, 120ff, 162, 163, 176, 180, 183, 189, 196, 205, 230, 238, 243, 248ff, 271ff, 286, 287, 297, 307 see also cognitive linguistics  193ff computational   linguistics  xi, 161ff, 175ff corpus linguistics    195, 271ff linguistic inter-group bias  113ff literary  ixff, 7ff, 21ff, 35ff, 55, 59, 60, 64, 83, 89ff, 103ff, 114, 115, 130, 133, 134, 135, 143, 147, 150, 151, 161, 162, 171ff, 193ff, 212, 226, 229, 231, 237, 239, 243ff,   271ff, 317ff see also literariness  127, 150, 175, 189, 208, 268, 271ff literary   communication  7ff literary narratives  (see narrative) literary reading  21ff, 49ff, 151, 326 literary reading expertise    (see expertise)

literary response    (see response) Literary Response   Questionnaire (LRQ)  150 literary study (also: study of literature)  ix, x, 8, 35ff, 146, 175, 183, 271, 272, 273 literary theory    (see theory) M manipulation  8, 15, 75ff, 197, 200, 272, 273 see also experimental manipulation  75, 78, 80, 81, 83ff extratextual   manipulation  86 mental models  25, 161ff metaphor  11, 24, 35ff, 51ff, 78, 96, 110, 158, 159, 193ff, 235, 247, 255, 261, 281 see also cognitive metaphor  35ff conceptual    metaphor  193ff methodology  ix, 7, 10, 11, 18, 22, 27, 28, 243, 247ff motivation  81, 93, 283ff, 323, 325 N narrative  x, 10, 11, 16, 17, 23, 24, 37, 39, 43, 58, 82, 89, 90, 92, 103, 105, 113ff, 130ff, 139ff, 168, 187, 189, 194, 197, 201, 202, 209, 222, 234, 239, 272, 275 literary narratives    103ff, 114, 115, 151, 194, 239 narrative perspective    (see perspective) non-literary  15, 158, 161, 162, 175ff, 193, 325 novelty  229ff, 272, 334 P participatory response    (see response) perception  32, 51, 52, 79, 92, 93, 100, 116, 141ff, 162, 211, 230, 272, 308, 309, 310, 311, 314

Index of keywords  personality  80, 134, 135, 347 see also personality   change (also: changes  in personality)  127ff personality measures  76, 134 personality traits  79, 132, 134 transformation of   personality  347 perspective (reader’s)  25, 27, 30, 49, 92ff, 114ff, 165, 197, 207, 208, 320 see also narrative   perspective  72, 89, 113ff, 209 phenomenology  49ff phonetic  89, 94, 95, 96, 248, 297ff poetry  17, 45, 62, 83, 84, 211ff, 229ff, 246, 273, 329, 330 see also British   poetry  229ff history of poetry  229ff popular fiction  150, 317ff post-processing  7, 11, 14, 30 psychology  v, ix, x, xi, xii, 3, 8, 15, 17, 33, 66, 68, 71, 87, 116, 124, 127, 129, 130, 186 see also cognitive   psychology   127, 347 clinical psychology 345 neuropsychology  151 psychology of   expertise  129, 130 social psychology  116 Q qualitative  21, 30, 60, 193, 197, 202, 207, 208, 225, 238, 277, 322 qualitative analysis   (also research)  158, 193, 195ff qualitative research 29 quantitative  x, 24, 27, 132, 168, 196, 206, 207, 209, 225, 236, 237, 289, 322 R reception  7, 10, 11, 12, 14, 31, 33, 193, 323, 348 see also reception of   film, 346

REDES  x, xii, 211, 265, 268, 269 relation (causal)  76ff see also semantic relation  176ff interrelation  8 re-lexicalisation  (see lexical) research  ethnographic research  25 research paradigms  21 qualitative research  (see qualitative analysis) response  ix, 23ff, 51, 56ff, 75ff, 89ff, 114, 115, 130, 140, 141, 143, 150, 209, 229, 289, 321, 323, 325 literary response  24, 75ff, 89, 325, 347 participatory   response  72, 114 S science studies  (see study) semantic semantic prosody    243ff, 274 semantic relation    (see relation) simulations  15, 98, 127ff, 237 social see also social cognition    (see cognition) social interaction  127, 132 social socio-cultural  8 sociological  xi, 322, 326 sociology  ix, 16, 39, 317, 319, 321, 322 study(ies) see also cultural study(ies)  35ff empirical study(ies)  ixff, 7ff, 32, 60, 75, 83, 89, 127, 130, 135, 151, 161, 171, 175, 176, 209, 229, 251, 271, 283 science study(ies)  35ff Society for the Empirical Study of Literature (IGEL)  xi, 161 study(ies) of literature  ix, xii, 7ff, 35, 46, 84, 127, 151, 162, 175, 229 style  7, 11, 25, 27, 82ff, 107, 117, 135, 161, 164, 180, 206, 209,

211ff, 229, 235, 236, 239, 240, 331, 334 see also empirical   stylistics  23 computational stylistics   (also data-assisted)    211ff, 243ff corpus stylistics  243ff stylistics  xi, 23, 29, 35, 78, 89, 92, 162, 163, 175, 176, 194, 204, 211, 213, 223, 226, 234, 236ff, 243, 247ff, 272, 273 sympathy  29, 77, 98, 114, 115, 127, 130 syntax  46, 109, 161ff, 243ff T tagging  193, 223 theory see also literary   theory  7ff, 35ff, 103, 108, 209 theory of mind  127, 131, 139ff traits (also characteristic, personality)  79, 132, 134, 162, 230, 244 translation  12, 180, 248, 297ff transliteration  297ff transportation  55, 139ff, 324, 325 trope  64, 193, 196, 201 type/token  8, 167, 170, 218, 271ff V Variables see also contextual   variables 76, 99 dependent variable 95 independent variable 75, 76, 78, 84, 86, 121 reader variables 76, 82, 87 visualization  211 W WordNet  167 Z Zeta  158, 211, 213ff

In the series Linguistic Approaches to Literature the following titles have been published thus far or are scheduled for publication: 5 4 3 2 1

Zyngier, Sonia, Marisa Bortolussi, Anna Chesnokova and Jan Auracher (eds.): Directions in Empirical Literary Studies. In honor of Willie van Peer. 2008. xii, 357 pp. Peer, Willie van (ed.): The Quality of Literature. Linguistic studies in literary evaluation. 2008. ix, 243 pp. McIntyre, Dan: Point of View in Plays. A cognitive stylistic approach to viewpoint in drama and other text-types. 2006. xii, 203 pp. Simpson, Paul: On the Discourse of Satire. Towards a stylistic model of satirical humour. 2003. xiv, 242 pp. Semino, Elena and Jonathan Culpeper (eds.): Cognitive Stylistics. Language and cognition in text analysis. 2002. xvi, 333 pp.