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