Victorina González-Díaz

How Shakespeare tempests the brain: Neuroimaging insights

Shakespeare made extensive use of the functional shift (FS), a rhetorical device involving a change in the grammatical status of words, e.g., using nouns as verbs. Previous work using event-related brain potentials showed how FS triggers a surprise effect inviting mental re-evaluation, seemingly independent of semantic processing. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate brain activation in participants making judgements on the semantic relationship between sentences -some containing a Shakespearean FS- and subsequently presented words. Behavioural performance in the semantic decision task was high and unaffected by sentence type. However, neuroimaging results showed that sentences featuring FS elicited significant activation beyond regions classically activated by typical language tasks, including the left caudate nucleus, the right inferior frontal gyrus and the right inferior temporal gyrus. These findings show how Shakespeares grammatical exploration forces the listener to take a more active role in integrating the meaning of what is said.

Eighteenth-century prescriptivism in English: A re-evaluation of its effects on actual language usage

Abstract Through a corpus-based analysis of the development of the inflectional subjunctive and double periphrastic comparison in Modern English, this paper sets out to investigate the real impact that prescriptive forces may have had on the contemporary language. The implications of the analysis are twofold: on a methodological level, the results point to precept and data corpora combinations as reliable indicators of language use in any given period; on a theoretical level, they challenge the overall importance that prescriptivism has been traditionally granted as a key factor in language change.

‘I quite detest the man’: Degree adverbs, female language and Jane Austen:

Burrows’ (1987) stylometric analysis of Austen’s novels associates quite with ‘the speech of the vulgarians, especially the women who predominate among them’. Through a corpus-based analysis, this article takes further Burrows’ (1987) claims by scrutinizing the socio-stylistic mappings between characters and functions of quite in Austen. The results indicate that gender (rather than vulgarity) is the main factor determining the socio-stylistic variation of quite in Austen’s novels. More generally, the study contributes to a better understanding of Jane Austen’s practices of linguistic gendering. Recent literary criticism has commented on Austen’s stylistic manipulations aimed at challenging 18th-century stereotypes of women’s language (Michaelson, 2002: 62–63). The corpus-based study provided in this article can be taken as a concrete example of how such manipulations work at the linguistic level. It suggests that Austen may have drawn on 18th-century stereotypes of ‘female’ language for the stylistic stratification of quite in her novels, although introducing functional and grammatical variations that allow for subtle differentiations across ‘female’ idiolects.