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.