A simple but essential point is that such machine-readable resources can be searched fast and accurately for many kinds of linguistic patterns.
In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the word dream(s) occurs twice at the very beginning, then several times in a cluster, when Marlow is trying to tell his dream, then fairly regularly throughout the rest of the story. The word nightmare(s) occurs once at the beginning, where there are hints for night-mares, and then in a cluster towards the end. This simple fact about word distribution is a textual signal that Marlow’s dream turns into a nightmare.
We can also search for intertextual references. In the opening and closing paragraphs of Heart of Darkness we have the phrase
waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth
The word uttermost is not frequent in general English (or in Conrad’s other writings), but it is frequent in the King James (1611) translation of the Bible, sometimes in the phrase uttermost part(s) of the earth. The phrase the ends of the earth is also frequent in the Bible.
We can also study how a single author uses a word in different texts.
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (‘Shall I compare thee. . .’) contains several words relating to the weather (summer’s day, temperate) and property law (lease, possession). One might then wonder whether other words refer to maritime trading (rough winds, changing course), and whether untrimmed in the second quatrain refers to trimming the sails or balancing the ballast of a ship:
. . . And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d
It is easy to check whether Shakespeare uses the word in this sense elsewhere. A search of his complete works provides two clear instances, and therefore evidence that this interpretation of the word in Sonnet 18 is plausible:
The ship is in her trim; the merry wind Blows fair from land. . . (Comedy of Errors, IV, i) As ravenous fishes, do a vessel follow
That is new-trimm’d. . . (Henry VIII, I, ii.)
Concordances
The most important technique in studying meaning in texts is a concord-ance. The format of this simple display device can make visible phraseo-logical regularities in texts, and it was recognised in the Middle Ages that this can contribute substantially to textual interpretation. Before computers, only a few texts of special religious and cultural value could
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justify the enormous manual labour required to construct concordances.
One of the most influential, produced for biblical exegesis, was the single-handed work of Alexander Cruden (1737), who also produced an index to Milton’s Paradise Lost (Cruden 1741). An early Shakespeare concordance was produced by Samuel Ayscough (1790).
The first use of technology was by Roberto Busa. In 1948 he persuaded IBM to begin entering the complete works of Thomas Aquinas into a computer, initially on 11 million punch cards, one for every word analysed. The eventual 20 million lines of text, in 65,000 pages (Busa 2007), was published as the Index Thomisticus, for which an online version with a powerful search engine is now freely available (www.corpusthomis-ticum.org/it/index.age). For many, his work in the 1940s defines the starting point of computer-assisted text analysis:
The founding moment was [Busa’s] creation of a radically transformed, reordered, disassembled and reassembled version of one of the
world’s most influential philosophies. (Ramsay2008) James Joyce’s short story Eveline tells of a young woman who plans to escape her dreary life in Dublin by eloping with her boyfriend to South America, but in the end she is paralysed with inaction and cannot leave home. The first word is she, which occurs 83 times in the story (once every 22 words on average).Figure 4.1shows all occurrences which are followed immediately by a lexical verb. (Elsewhere, she is followed by BE (she was tired), modal verbs (she would be married), references to the past (she used to visit), etc.)
Alphabetising the verbs to the right of she makes it easy to see that they are almost all mental verbs, some repeated (e.g. felt, heard, remembered).
Others signal inaction (e.g. sat, continued to sit). Only four are clear action verbs: elbowed (she is going shopping for her family); stood up (she goes to the harbour to meet her boyfriend: but in a sudden impulse of terror), gripped (she grips the rail at the harbour: but this emphasises her inability to move), and went (but it’s only hypothetical). This clear pattern – the co-occurrence of a pronoun with a restricted set of verbs – contributes to the textual cohesion and to the interpretation that Eveline thinks, but doesn’t/can’t act. Stubbs (2001) and O’Halloran (2007) provide computer-assisted analyses of this short story.
It is clear that such a display technique rips textual fragments out of context, but that is precisely its purpose: to display a text differently, to act as an estrangement device, and thereby to reveal patterns which are not otherwise visible (Ramsay 2008). Literary interpretation requires more context than is visible in short concordance lines, but the concord-ance tells us what to look at in more detail (and most concordconcord-ance software allows the context to be expanded to full sentences, whole paragraphs, etc.).
Similarly, in Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw, we can study the verbs following the narrative ‘I’. The main story is told by an unreliable, possibly mad, narrator, whose first words are I remember. Her unreliability is linguistically signalled by verbs of perception, listed here with their frequencies:
I felt 45; I know/knew 32; I remember 23; I thought 12; I suppose(d) 11;
I believe(d) 6; I saw 31; I see 22; I had seen 13; I could see 9
The lemmas KNOW and MEAN are frequent (in a short text of only 42,880 words):
know 89, knew 37, known 15, knows 7, knowledge 6, knowing 4, mean 84, meaning 86, meant 82, means 1
In a study of the book (Stubbs2008), I argue that frequent vocabulary in the semantic fields of perception and knowledge signals important themes of language and (mis)communication. But I conclude, slightly sceptically,
mined portholes. She answered nothing. She felt her ors of the sheds she caught a glimpse of the black m
running out but she continued to sit by the window, y in her hand as she elbowed her way through the cro ohemian Girl and she felt elated as she sat in an un nswered nothing. She felt her cheek pale and cold an upon her heart. She felt him seize her hand: – Come would drown her. She gripped with both hands at the hall and outside she heard a melancholy air of Italy
She trembled as she heard again her mother’s voice on his way home; she heard his footsteps clacking al
in her body and she kept moving her lips in silent ther’s violence. She knew it was that that had given t organ playing. She knew the air. Strange that it s er favourite but she liked Harry too. Her father was her home. Home! She looked round the room, reviewin ng over here! As she mused the pitiful vision of her ming old lately, she noticed; he would miss her. Som aze of distress, she prayed to God to direct her, to s over nineteen, she sometimes felt herself in dange e Hill of Howth. She remembered her father putting o given sixpence. She remembered her father strutting ng as she could. She remembered the last night of he or her. How well she remembered the first time she h
She sat at the window watching the e felt elated as she sat in an unaccustomed part of y. Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish! – Evelin l called to her. She set her white face to him, pass would save her. She stood among the swaying crowd i Derevaun Seraun! She stood up in a sudden impulse of final craziness. She trembled as she heard again her . Was that wise? She tried to weigh each side of the s love, too. But she wanted to live. Why should she nto the mist. If she went, tomorrow she would be on
Figure 4.1: Occurrences of she followed by a lexical verb in Eveline by James Joyce
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that there are few other observable features which linguistic description can get its teeth into. Much hinges on inference and cultural knowledge which leave few traces in the surface of the text. (Alternatively, one could conclude that I was not perceptive enough to find them.)