Elsevier

NeuroImage

Volume 40, Issue 2, 1 April 2008, Pages 923-931
NeuroImage

Event-related potential characterisation of the Shakespearean functional shift in narrative sentence structure

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2007.12.006Get rights and content

Abstract

Neurolinguistic studies have scrutinised the physiological consequences of disruptions in the flow of language comprehension produced by violations of meaning, syntax, or both. Some 400 years ago, Shakespeare already crafted verses in which the functional status of words was changed, as in “to lip a wanton in a secure couch”. Here, we tested the effect of word class conversion as used by Shakespeare – the functional shift – on event-related brain potential waves traditionally reported in neurophysiolinguistics: the left anterior negativity (LAN), the N400, and the P600. Participants made meaningfulness decisions to sentences containing (a) a semantic incongruity, (b) a functional shift, (c) a double violation, or (d) neither a semantic incongruity nor a syntactic violation. The Shakespearean functional shift elicited significant LAN and P600 modulations but failed to modulate the N400 wave. This provides evidence that words which had their functional status changed triggered both an early syntactic evaluation process thought to be mainly automatic and a delayed re-evaluation/repair process that is more controlled, but semantic integration required no additional processing. We propose that this dissociation between syntactic and semantic evaluation enabled Shakespeare to create dramatic effects without diverting his public away from meaning.

Introduction

Early Modern English (1500–1700) text structure was more flexible than that of the present-day (Abbott, 1869). The Subject–Verb–Object pattern had already established itself as the default sentence order in the period; however, in comparison to the present-day, a greater variety of syntactic patterns were allowed, often as a way to highlight the important constituents of the sentence and to create an element of surprise. Changing sentence patterns were not the only rhetorical device commonly used in the period, though. A remarkable characteristic of the Elizabethan language was what we nowadays call functional shift or word conversion (Quirk et al., 1985), namely, the process whereby one part of speech becomes another with different function, as the word ‘boy’ in “I shall see/Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness/I' the posture of a whore” (Shakespeare, 2005a). Shakespeare's plays constitute a state-of-the-art example of this trend of use.

Functional shift is a tool that Shakespeare selectively used to work against the laws of grammar (Blake, 1983). It offers a small, powerfully compressed epitome of Shakespeare's thinking: a rapid linguistic shift that relates to Shakespeare's gift for moving quickly from one sense to another in the sudden creation of metaphor. The rebel, Jack Cade complains to Lord Saye in The Second Part of Henry VI, “Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school.... It will be proved to thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear” (Shakespeare, 2005b). But Shakespeare himself exploited the positive mental activity excited by immediately converting noun to verb or verb to noun. Research on the stylistic value of word conversion and its importance as a means of enlarging a language's lexicon is not uncommon in previous literature (Nevalainen, 1999). However, the mechanism by which such rhetorical device affects activity in the human brain, is unknown.

With the advent of event-related potentials (ERPs), psycholinguistics entered a new age in that processes of language comprehension can be decomposed in elementary cognitive processes and directly related to brain activity. For example, based on observations of the average electrical activity produced by the brain over the scalp in response to the presentation of written or spoken words, neurolinguists have described peaks of activity indexing semantic (Kutas and Hillyard, 1980, Kutas and Hillyard, 1984), morphosyntactic (Friederici and Jacobsen, 1999, Hagoort, 2003, Munte et al., 1993, Palolahti et al., 2005), word category (Osterhout, 1997), and phrase structure analysis (Friederici et al., 1999, Gunter and Friederici, 1999). Here we studied the way in which the Shakespearean functional shift is integrated at a neural level based on ERP indices of semantic and grammatical processing. On the one hand, unexpected semantic content modulates the N400, a negative wave with an average peaking latency of 400 ms post-stimulus thought to index semantic integration mechanisms (Kutas and Hillyard, 1980, Kutas and Hillyard, 1984). On the other hand, syntactic violations have been shown to trigger one or two components distinct from the N400 wave: namely (a) a left anterior negativity (LAN) which is not always observed and tends to vary in latency and topography depending on the type of violation encountered (Friederici, 2002, Friederici et al., 1993, Hagoort et al., 2003, Hahne and Friederici, 1999) and (b) a late parietal positive wave peaking around 600 ms post-stimulus, the P600, also referred to as the syntactic positive shift (SPS), which has been associated with late syntactic re-evaluation processes or “second-pass” resolution of syntactic anomalies (Friederici and Jacobsen, 1999, Hagoort, 2003, Hagoort et al., 1993, Hahne and Friederici, 1999, Osterhout, 1997).

We took authentic examples of Shakespeare's functional shifts from two sources: (a) comments and/or examples provided in scholarly publications on Shakespeare's language, and (b) wordlists of each of Shakespeare's plays. We checked the historical standing of the functional shifts in the Oxford English Dictionary, and incorporated them into sentences diluted into modern English to characterise the pattern of physiological activity elicited by such ‘pure’ word class violations. We then investigated the ERP components modulated when our Shakespeare writes: “lip something loving in my ear” instead of “whisper something loving in my ear”.

Section snippets

Participants

Twenty-one young university students (mean age = 20.4 ± 3.6 years, 16 women, 4 left-handed) took part in the study that was approved by the ethics committee of Bangor University. They were paid with course credits or cash. Informed consent was obtained after the nature and possible consequences of the studies were explained. All participants had normal or corrected-to-normal vision and no self-reported symptoms of developmental dyslexia or neurological history. In order not to bias the

Results

There was a main effect of syntactic violation on error rates (F1,20 = 28.2, p < .0001) indicating less errors for syntactically correct than incorrect sentences and a main effect of semantic incongruence (F1,20 = 21.4, p < .0001) such that semantically sound sentences elicited less errors than those containing a semantically unexpected word (Fig. 1). The two factors interacted (F1,20 = 32.9, p < .0001) due to the functional shift condition generating more errors than all other conditions. There was also a

Discussion

Error rates peaked for the functional shift condition but remained below chance (Fig. 1) and reaction times for correct trials were overall significantly longer for syntactic violations than syntactically correct sentences. Therefore, judging from overt measures of sentence processing, participants found word class conversions rather difficult – but not impossible – to integrate. In other words, on the surface, the Shakespearian functional shift appeared to have a detrimental effect on sentence

Conclusion

Our study shows that it is possible to address questions of interest to scholars in art and humanities using methods so far restricted to neuroscientific approaches. It opens up inter-disciplinary avenues for investigating the interface between literature and neuroscience. It must be kept in mind, however, that studies attempting to measure the neurophysiological effects of literary works in an “ecological” fashion will inevitably face two major challenges: (a) the spirit of the time and the

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Steve Tipper and Mark Roberts for assistance and comments. G.T. is funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Science Research Council UK (S18007) and the Economic and Social Research Council (RES-000-23-0095 and RES-E024556-1). C.M. is funded by the Fyssen Foundation and the Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique.

Competing interests statement: The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.

References (33)

  • N.F. Blake

    Shakespeare's Language: An Introduction

    (1983)
  • M. Coltheart

    The MRC psycholinguistic database

    Q. J. Exp. Psychol.

    (1981)
  • S. Coulson et al.

    Expect the unexpected: event-related brain response to morphosyntactic violations

    Lang. Cogn. Processes.

    (1998)
  • A.D. Friederici et al.

    Processing grammatical gender during language comprehension

    J. Psychiatr. Res.

    (1999)
  • A.D. Friederici et al.

    Lexical integration: sequential effects of syntactic and semantic information

    Mem. Cogn.

    (1999)
  • T.C. Gunter et al.

    Concerning the automaticity of syntactic processing

    Psychophysiology

    (1999)
  • Cited by (39)

    • What the eyes reveal about (reading) poetry

      2021, Poetics
      Citation Excerpt :

      Rather, such empirical studies pursue complementary desiderata, with an exclusive focus on the aesthetic and emotional effects of the special treatment of language in poetry. Whereas neuroscientific methods have been used in several studies on reading poetry (Obermeier et al., 2016; Thierry et al., 2008; Vaughan-Evans et al., 2016; Wassiliwizky et al., 2017), reading research that uses eye tracking has largely focused on nonliterary prose and artificial texts. Moreover, it has primarily focused on basic components of the reading process, such as word recognition and syntactic parsing (for reviews, see (Clifton and Duffy, 2001; Graesser, Millis and Zwaan, 1997; Rayner, 1998)).

    • Reading Shakespearean tropes in a foreign tongue: Age of L2 acquisition modulates neural responses to functional shifts

      2019, Neuropsychologia
      Citation Excerpt :

      For example, in the Shakespearean passage To lip a wanton in a secure couch, the word lip, though canonically used as a noun, acts as a verb retaining critical semantic features of its intended meaning (to kiss) (Quirk et al., 1985). In native English users, FSs selectively modulate event-related potentials (ERPs) sensitive to syntactic anomalies (Thierry et al., 2008) and increase activity in brain regions associated with novel integration of meaning (Keidel et al., 2013). However, no study has yet explored how these tropes are processed by users of English as a foreign language (L2), who actually outnumber native speakers (Lewis et al., 2018) and prove numerous among the readership of Shakespeare’s originals (Kennedy, 2001).

    • Syntax does not necessarily precede semantics in sentence processing: ERP evidence from Chinese

      2013, Brain and Language
      Citation Excerpt :

      The N400 effects therefore may reflect semantic processes occurring on the basis of a well-formed syntactic structure (for comments see Bornkessel-schlesewsky & Schlesewsky, 2009; Friederici, 2011; Isel et al., 2007). Third and finally, although N400 effects were found for combined syntactic category and semantic anomalies in Hahne and Friederici (2002, Experiment 2) and Thierry et al. (2008), the participants in these studies were explicitly asked to disregard syntactic anomalies, and therefore it is not clear whether the N400 effects in these studies can be generalized to a context in which the participants were not explicitly asked to ignore syntax. Recently, several studies have investigated ERP effects of combined syntactic category and semantic anomalies in Chinese, a non-Indo-European language that does not use grammatical morphology to mark syntactic category or syntactic features such as person, number (except plural inflection of human nouns), case, and tense (Ye, Luo, Friederici, & Zhou, 2006; Yu & Zhang, 2008; Zhang et al., 2010).

    • How Shakespeare tempests the brain: Neuroimaging insights

      2013, Cortex
      Citation Excerpt :

      In our results, the FS appears to disrupt automatic syntactic and semantic integration leading to increased activity in the basal ganglia, an effect also observed when bilinguals switch from one language to another (Crinion et al., 2006). Furthermore, Frisch et al. (2003) suggested that the basal ganglia may play a key role in the generation of the P600, an ERP component thought to index syntactic processing, and which Thierry et al. (2008) reported to be significantly modulated during FS processing. Beyond areas typically associated with language processing, we observed greater activation for FS sentences in the ACC/SFG, PCC and DMPFC.

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text