The stings for our catalog had to be single words or a string of contiguous words.
The string had to be long enough to complete a stable or functionally unambigu-ous priming experience for an audience. Many single words fit this description
and many do not. High-frequency function words (e.g., just, for, to, of, and) are too ambiguous to contribute a univocal priming experience. We first focused our attention on strings more than single words to accommodate the inherently phrasal and textual character of language. Many single words eventually entered our catalog, but only after considering functions that were expressible in longer runs. After determining what seemed stable functions in multi-word runs, we systematically went through automatically generated word lists*of the 50,000 most frequent words of English. We found that, depending on the starting letter, a large percentage (from 10 to 30%) of single words are too ambiguous to carry univocal or distinctive functions on behalf of audience experience. Although the dominant organization of dictionaries and thesauri is the single word entry, the most important lesson of our exercise running through single-word dictionaries is that speaker and writers ply a rhetorical craft that relies on functions often spanning multiple word runs. This finding comports with the substantial independent evidence that writers do not compose one word at a time but compose in larger strings (Wray & Perkins, 2000). Altenberg (1990) estimated that up to 70% of our language performance in speaking or writing derives from formulaic strings rather than single words. This may seem a deflating observation for writing teachers who seek to inspire creativity by warning students to avoid “cut-and-paste” clichés of language in favor of original thought. When the formulas are truly clichés and idioms (e.g., let the cat out of the bag, spill the beans), that is, frozen from variability, the teachers’ warning is not bad advice. However, although all frozen formulas and clichés are linguistic strings, the strings in English we describe in this book are seldom clichés or idioms in the narrow sense and accept wide variation.
Moreover, in light of the mathematics of combination, a writer who learns strings to prime the audience experience has learned a much larger space for creative choice than the writer who knows all the single-word entries in the largest English dictionary but does not know how to combine these entries to prime for audience experience. Consequently, a thorough understanding of English strings and their effects on readers is invaluable for supporting one’s own exploration, experimenta-tion, and creativity with language.
Although low-frequency content words can pin down relatively stable textual experiences and priming actions, many single words of English are extremely unstable with respect to priming action. The priming ambiguity is often accom-panied by a part-of-speech ambiguity, as many words can function as either nouns or verbs. Take the word state as in:
43. State of mind (mood)
44. They need to state their case (part of verb phrase) 45. State of Missouri (place)
*These word-lists are commercially available from many vendors, with different vendors carrying out their own in-house research on frequencies from corpus data. The word lists we used are available from WinterTree Software Inc.
46. He was in quite a state (negative reference) 47. State of euphoria (positive reference) 48. Head of State (official title)
The priming effect of state on a reader, as many single words of English, is widely variable. Although the word state has relatively frequent usage across English, it lacks the intactness or stability of priming action we required for our catalog.
Coupled with the constraint of functional unambiguity is the constraint of reusability or robustness. Ambiguity is a chronic problem of strings that are too short. The failure to be reusable or robust is the chronic problem of strings that are too long. Strings that exceed two or three words can fail to recur across texts.
Just as we had to reject many single-word entries from our catalog study, we also had to reject long strings that were extremely stable but nonrecurring. A good example is a string we found in an e-mail warning from the maintainer of a campus online registration system:
49. Any efforts to clog the system at unauthorized times will result in the suspension of privileges.
Taken as a single speech act, this string is unambiguous as a warning or threat.
That is to say, one will likely never come across this identical string as anything but a warning or threat. That’s the good news. The bad news is that one is not likely ever to see this string in another text — period! The string is simply too rare to be repeated. The linguist Noam Chomsky (1957) discouraged the statistical study of language when he noted that the chances of hearing the exact same grammatical sentence (e.g., “colorless ideas sleep furiously”) are next to zero.
Chomsky overlooked the frequent recurrence of smaller 1 to 5 word English strings across English texts, which we have relied upon in our own research.
However, his basic insight, namely that complete sentences seldom repeat verbatim across the language, is accurate. Sentence-length strings that are stable in terms of audience priming are typically nonrepeating and so nonrobust. Long strings enter the realm of authorial style and can leave behind altogether the reusable fund of language from which all speakers and writers are free to draw.
Understanding the limitations of English strings that are either too short or too long allowed us also to appreciate the significant gap between ordinary linguistic reuse and borrowing (which is common and necessary among writers) and plagiarism (which is frowned on as a crime of the writer). Linguistic borrowing is a requirement for learning how to be an original writer. Plagiarism is not. We are hardly the first to point out this mistake. As a line of scholars (Ede &
Lunsford, 1990; Howard, 1999;Woodmansee, 1996; see also the collections of Buranen & Roy, 1999; Woodmansee & Jaszi, 1994) interested in rethinking authorship and intellectual property have observed, the idea of the “original”
writer, untouched by linguistic reuse and borrowings, is a romantic myth. The appeal of the myth is to exaggerate the writer’s “genius” by concealing the extensive role borrowing plays even in texts judged most original. All writers learn their trade by borrowing, extensively and implicitly, from the strings of others. Although one cannot minimize plagiarism as a crime, our culture at times seems, unreasonably, to extend the charge of plagiarism to any borrowing at all.
Howard (1999) in particular noted the wide confusion between imitating the pros-eone has read (what she called “patchwriting”) with the charge of academic dis-honesty. The sad and ironic result, according to Howard, is that we criminalize the very behavior that students must practice to learn to be authors.
Our research provided some insight into why we have a hard time appreci-ating the dependence of so-called “original” writing on the borrowing of precomposed strings. It is very hard for the human eye to see these borrowings, especially when they occur in short (2 to 5 word) runs. We learn to read for meaning, which often requires our rehearsing abstracted gists (e.g., “What is the author telling me?”) that we accumulate over sentences and paragraphs.
Unless we are engaged in close reading of the language, we do not stop to take in all the stings that prime the meaning to which we finally arrive. We see the edifice of meaning, in other words, without also seeing the borrowed expression that holds it up. We focus on the art of the writer, reluctant to think that such an original art could possibly rely on so many borrowed parts.