More papers, more anxieties

I'm currently trying to write a paper on do-support in Shakespeare. It was all so clear in my head a day ago, and then I waited to do the actual writing and the ideas became more muddled. But it's imperative that I finish this paper as soon as possible so I get to the other two.

Here's a basic outline of what I want to say: this is a corpus-based study of Shakespeare's language that focuses on one grammatical feature that was in flux in Early Modern English, known as do-support. My main (small, possibly already obvious or simply misguided) discovery is that the distribution of do-support among male and female characters in Shakespeare reflects the sociolinguistic reality of do-support during the time when Shakespeare was writing. A team of Finnish researchers working in the emerging field of historical sociolinguistics have determined that the rise of auxiliary "do," like other grammatical changes in EME, varied systemically according to the gender, region, and register of the speaker/writer. This is signficant because synchronic sociolinguistics long ago formulated a number of principles that guide language change-- that women tend to be at the forefront of linguistic innovations, that the diffusion of a new linguistic feature follows an S-curve when one graphs frequency of occurance over time, and that both bottom-up and top-down change according to status or social class are possible-- and it's gratifying and exciting to see that these principles are in fact borne out by diachronic data spanning centuries.

There are many variables one could isolate when it comes to the thousands of instances of do-support and non-do-support in Shakespeare, and I want to briefly touch on a number of them-- sociolinguistic variables like status and formality/informality, textual variables like verse vs. prose, possible semantic and phonotactic triggers for do-support such as emphasis and avoidance of particular consonant clusters, and, of course, rhetorical effect and wordplay, which are much harder to qualify. I want to acknowledge the previous efforts to see do-support as a feature of style or idiolect, but then invert the question and ask not how Shakespeare crafts a distinct "style" from the linguistic resources of Early Modern English, but how Early Modern English shapes or limits or informs Shakespeare's plays. My main focus is the variable of gender, and thus my statistics will focus on how the use or non-use of do varies with the gender of the character. In my Shakespeare corpus, female characters consistently show higher rates of do-support in every syntactic context that eventually led to obligatory do-support in modern English. These syntactic contexts include negative declaratives, negative imperatives, wh-questions, and yes-no questions. The rates of do-support for women and men in fact closely match the gender-split data on periphrastic do from the Corpus of Early English Correspondence. This is a striking and exciting result because one wouldn't expect something as subtle as do-support-- a linguistic feature that one assumes operated "below the level of consciousness"-- to in fact show up in dramatic literature in accurate sociolinguistic distribution. This says something about the verisimilitude of Shakespeare's plays.

What complicates this picture further in other exciting ways is that the CEEC researchers determined that the diachronic data for do-support exhibit a "switch from male to female advantage." In the middle of the 16th century, men apparently used do-support more than women, but right around the turn of the century women overtook them even as both groups continued up the curve in frequency of use. In fact, this period-- from about 1580 to 1620-- is a nexus point at which a multiplicity of sociolinguistic shifts converge, even as grammatical changes either accelerate (and go on to become regulated) or peak (and subsequently fall out of use). In my data, women robustly lead men in negative imperatives and questions of both kinds. The data for negative declaratives remained ambiguous while I collected it, though, and with each successive play that I encoded the advantage seemed to shift from male to female and back again. In the end the do-support rates for men and women seemed almost identical. When you divide my corpus of 16 plays into two groups, however, it becomes clear that in the first half of the period of Shakespeare's writing that I'm addressing (from about 1588-1603), men show a slight but significant lead over women, and in the second half (from about 1604-1611), women show a slight lead over men. It would be quite extraordinary if the sociolinguistic distribution of do-support in Shakespeare's plays in fact enacts a contemporary sociolinguistic shift in EME. It would seem to suggest, among other things, an extraordinary sensitivity on Shakespeare's part to shifting usages around him and a desire to portray gender with sociolinguistic fidelity.

There are still problems with this line of argument-- the CEEC researchers don't address the development of d0-support in negative imperatives and questions, for example, because they didn't have enough tokens in their corpus. I thus cannot prove that do-support in questions and negative imperatives was more "advanced" than it was in negative declaratives in Shakespeare's period, or that, indeed, there would have been any shift from male to female advantage at all. I do know from Ellegard's study, of course, that questions already had much higher rates of d0-support than neg declaratives, and thus I can claim somewhat plausibly that such a shift, if there was one, would already have been completed by this time. Negative imperatives are a problem, though: the rates are low, and yet women lead men considerably. My figures also don't resemble Ellegard's, although I think this may be the case because he includes cases with main verb "be." The way to handle this may be just to let the tables speak for themselves and not speculate or theorize about the reasons for female advantage in negative imperatives and questions-- the only studies I can rely on for these, after all, are Ellegard, Stein's massive but somewhat hard-to-use diachronic study of do-support, and maybe Tieken-Boon's study of d0-support in the 18th century.

I don't think such a paper would be at all meaningful or submittable unless I was able to connect this observation about Shakespeare's portrayal of sociolinguistic realities to some larger interpretive argument. What does this usage of language say about gender? Are female characters "innovators" in Shakespeare in other ways as well? Are there clear internal reasons for the higher rates of do-support in females-- for example, a tendency to use "thou" over "you" (if one is to believe Stein's theory about 2nd-person-singular consonant cluster inflections, at any rate)? An higher rate of impassioned pleas and commands (if one is to believe that do carries the connotation of emphasis even in these syntactic environments)? I know other students might experience the temptation to thematize the women-overtaking-men pattern of linguistic change, but I think I'll find that relatively easy to resist. But I do want somehow to be able to ground some observations about women in Shakespeare in a series of close readings.

Finally, a whip-smart, supremely capable, consensus-building president

Obama wins by a landslide. Cars are honking outside our window. I knew this was going to happen, but I feel utterly euphoric.

He gave an inspiring victory speech in Chicago, too.

Something's wrong with the timestamp mechanism on this blog-- right now the time should read 12:51. I'm posting this on November 5, an hour after midnight.

Election 2008

It's past 3am and I can't stop reading every last election news report, polling result, and op-ed online (I've already read the NY Times, Slate, Salon, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel and have gradually spiraled down to various Christian conservative websites). Obama's going to win today, and it's just such an extraordinary and pivotal moment that I can't quite focus on anything else.

I think this Sidney Blumenthal column (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/04/uselections2008-johnmccain) accurately and articulately describes why this election is so momentous. Basically, the current support for Obama reflects one of those major political realignments that hits the US every half-century or so, always prompted by utter catastrophe. The Civil War empowered the Republican party of the mid-19th-century; the Great Depression spawned the New Deal and put Franklin's Democrats in power until the "great fracturing" of the liberal coalition in 1968; the Vietnam War and the cultural conflicts of the 60s discredited the Democrats of the time; Nixon's tactic of appealing to the "silent majority" then inaugurated the long, corrupt, backlash-driven, plen-T-plaining era of Republican rule that culminated in Reagan and went nova with Bush.

I think it's pathetic that things had to get this bad before the Republicans lost widespread American support. Right now people are alert to the bad economy and (perhaps) to the pointless, ruinous war in Iraq. But by the time of the 2004 election the government had already proven itself to be laughably, grotesquely horrible and immoral; corrupt and staffed by incompetent clowns; obsessed with PR and image management to the exclusion of actual governance; and people still went and voted for the guy. I was in Philly at the time. I remember going to bed hopeful that Kerry had won and waking up in disbelief and heartbreak. Wasn't Abu Gharib enough? Wasn't the absence of weapons of mass destruction enough? Bush had too many blunders and damaging policies to mention, and Bush's 2004 campaign was itself a cringe-worthy hypocritical sham (the rich scion of a political dynasty is the one who represents the ordinary Joe? the president who attacked the wrong country is the one who's "tough on terrorism"?), but above all, the tragic, unprovoked war undertaken under false pretenses should have triggered national outrage and chased him all the way back to Crawford.

The past eight years have been so dramatic and surreal that they truly have been stranger than fiction. From the illegitimate election of 2000 to Sept. 11 attacks, from the invasion of Iraq to Bush's reelection, from the wiretapping civil-rights violations to the Wall Street crash, the whole Bush presidency reads like an exceptionally well-plotted tragedy. The period even begins at the start of a millenium. I'm fairly certain the decade will be studied as a unit in humanities courses in the future, much the way the 1960s are studied now.

It's sobering also to recognize that the Bush presidency has framed my entire young adulthood. September 11th occured during my second week of college. I vote for his successor as a married graduate student, in my last year as a "young voter." In between, my entire adult political awareness has been shaped by the culture wars of the Bush era and by the dominance of thugs in the federal government. When I was younger my shock and disbelief took the form of a cautious worry about my own political awareness--this can't really be the way the world is run, can it?-- although it has since morphed into a secure but despairing view of the American political establishment. In many ways I became convinced of the validity of English literature as a field of study because of the urgency of the Bush years. Satire, political allegory, propaganda, dystopia, and counterfactual narrative all take on a certain power when confronted with authoritarianism and the wholesale manipulation of truth by political leaders; I was incredibly impressed by how The Onion and Stephen Colbert rose to the occasion and delivered stinging critiques when other critical voices were absent (or being drowned out). Literature is ultimately about life; imaginative writing makes space for dissent, and thereby makes itself relevant.