Andrew Hardie
Reader in Linguistics, Lancaster University
Corpus methodologist and grammarian
Lead developer, CWB & CQPweb
Technical lead, Encyclopedia of Shakespeare's Language
@HardieResearch | http://t.co/Xqkb8kA8
Location Lancaster, UK
Activity
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Alas, it's easier to speculate on points like this than it is to actually prove them!
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Andrew Hardie replied to Andrew Hardie
It's a mystery to us too, Margaret.
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I'm afraid pronunciation is one thing we *don't* cover here. I hope that won't deter you from having a look anyway!
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Hi @LornaMetcalfe - unfortunately we as the academic staff don't have direct access to the guts of the software, and as you know, the course is not officially "running" at present, so FutureLearn technical staff will not be playing very close attention. They certainly aren't reading comments - you might try sending in an actual report about the error?
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@LornaMetcalfe I'd avoid talking about a "hijack" in this context; it implies malicious intent that is certainly not present in this case. "Gay" meaning homosexual originated in the 1930s as an outgrowth of the earlier meaning which the OED characterises as "dedicated to social pleasures; dissolute, promiscuous; frivolous, hedonistic [...] uninhibited; wild,...
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@LornaMetcalfe Here is a link to where I have given suggestions on how to address video issues: https://www.futurelearn.com/comments/67508498
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@NicoleV yes.
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I have no idea what caused that to go wrong, but it's fixed now!
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It's worth noting that when she says "thy nature" he's not actually there!
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Admittedly it's not as widespread a concept as it once was, but there are many examples to be found in early 20th century books, for instance.
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Quite so.
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Kennings haven't come up because, as you say, they are characteristic of a period long before Shakespeare's time, and not something that are likely to have been an important influence on his usage. Renaissance poetry was much more interested in Classical models of poetic language than ancient Germanic.
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OED's earliest example for "mange tout" is 1823.
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Hi Lorna, see my note here, https://www.futurelearn.com/comments/67508498 - it may help.
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Andrew Hardie replied to Tim Peters
@TimPeters But Shakespeare *does* clearly express Christian affiliation. I'm not sure whether more or less than other writers of the period, but you'll find clear Christian references all over the place. As for religion as a governing force --- just have a look at the description of Richard coming to be King in R3 for instance.
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The answer is, none. All languages are affected by the languages around them. The difference is in the extent.
By the way, re "what an interesting language" - there's a famous little text called "Uncleftish Beholding" by Poul Anderson, which is an intro atomic theory with all the Latinate words replaced with native forms built up from English translations...
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Andrew Hardie replied to Lorna Metcalfe
The way I see it is that if the actors on the stage come across as speaking an impenetrable code, then that is bad acting. Part of the task of the performer is to convey the meaning even of the bits that are hard to follow.
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Andrew Hardie made a comment
A general comment: there have been reports of videos playing too quietly, or broken-up, or in such a way that only part of the picture can't be seen.
There's no 100% fix for this BUT if the in-browser video player is not showing up correctly, it is worth downloading the video using the links under the player. Then, you can play it in whatever video program...
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This is because in earlier times, people were too ready to assume that the author of the first recorded example in the Oxford English Dictionary was the inventor of the word, whereas nowadays people tend to bear in mind that a word might easily have been circulating in spoken English, or in written texts we don't have, before the first recorded example....
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Andrew Hardie replied to Lisa NL
Hi Lisa, sorry about this - other participants have occasionally reported similar issues but I have no insight into what the cause may be. I've posted some suggestions in an earlier comment (link below) but often your best course of action may be to contact FutureLearn staff.
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Andrew Hardie replied to Barbara Lister
Type = a particular word form considered in the abstract.
Token = one specific example of a type.
So, for instance, if we say "We read the word 'big' on pg 23 of the book", then 'word' there can be replaced with 'token'.
But, if we say "The word 'big' occurs 100 times in this book" then 'word' does not mean a specific example. It means a whole class...
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Andrew Hardie replied to Laurence Scott
That blog post is also by me!
Yes, Log Ratio is the binary log of the ratio of relative frequencies. Ratio of relative frequencies (known more generally in stats as risk ratio), because I judge this the most transparent measure of differences. Log, so that bigger and smaller numbers are positive/negative. Binary log, because that was already familiar in the...
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Andrew Hardie replied to Fiona Lockwood
In contexts other than corpus linguistics that's exactly what "key" does mean: words judged to be important in summarising what a text is about.
The reason the same term is used is that statistical "keywords" were invented with the idea that this would be a more objective way to get the same thing, IE the words that really summed up the gist of a text. ...
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Thanks for spotting this! the URL should have been http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/esc-user-service/doc/ESC-First-Folio-Plus-Manual.pdf
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Andrew Hardie made a comment
A note: the correct link for the corpus documentation is http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/esc-user-service/doc/ESC-First-Folio-Plus-Manual.pdf
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Yes. It's all about whether BE or HAVE is used before the past participle in the perfect construction.
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I believe it developed in parallel in all of them, of course since they were all in contact and influencing each other; English switching over to using "have" in all cases was a later, secondary development. See earlier comments here: https://www.futurelearn.com/comments/66153810
[Interestingly, in the Indo-Aryan languages which were a lot more distant, the...
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@MaxHughes Oh yes, it's reasonably common around the world, not just in Indo-European.
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Indeed, Turkish is a language which has LOTS of suffixes which express the various functions that English uses auxiliary verb constructions for.
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Yes, that's exactly the reason. Another example is split infinitives (with an adverb between "to" and the verb): the 1800s prescriptivists decided they were incorrect, because in Latin, an infinitive is just one word so there can't be an adverb in the middle.
Spotting the gap in that logic is left as an exercise for the reader.
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Andrew Hardie replied to Tim Peters
Modern English is a VERY stable language, though - especially Standard English. There was much more change between Chaucer and Shakespeare than between Shakespeare and today.
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What the mention of "dialectal" is getting at is this: only *Standard* English, being the written form, borrows lots of words from Latin. Other dialects don't. If they have Latinate words in them, they have absorbed them via Standard English, not directly from Latin. So if you have a specifically dialectal word - i.e. one used in a regional dialect but not...
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Sometimes, yes.
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Andrew Hardie replied to Tim Peters
Your last para is certainly correct in terms of the use of stereotypes in pop culture, but generally I prefer to avoid judgemental terms like "substandard" in favour of descriptive terminology like "non-standard".
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Andrew Hardie replied to J S
That's contested, though. There's another view that derives it from "nepos" meaning nephew or grandson, so the name would mean "Grandson of Waters". And yet another view that is that it was borrowed from Etruscan (which also might have borrowed it from somewhere else).
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Andrew Hardie replied to Kathy H
Well, definitionally, when grammar evolves that will involve the use of new forms that do not comply with the norms of the earlier period, plus older forms falling into disuse. Shakespeare used poor grammar if you measure him by Chaucer's standard, and Chaucer used bad grammar if you measure him by the standards of the Beowulf poet. (But social disapproval of...
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Andrew Hardie replied to Lisa NL
Actually, the Greek name for the sea god is Poseidon - Neptune is all Latin!
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Authorship attribution studies normally rely on frequency techniques that are similar to, but distinct from, keyword. This is because authorship attribution scholars tend to focus on the frequency behaviour of only the most highly frequent words. They believe these to be the least "controlled" and therefore the most likely to be unique to an author....
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Hi Patricia, did you try the download option? That sometimes works when the in-browser player doesn't.
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I assume the text in question is the "to be or not to be" soliloquy?
Hamlet's "Aye, there's the rub" is found in the Second Quarto and the First Folio (and thus, also in modern editions); the equivalent in the First Quarto is "aye marry there it goes".
You might be thinking about the slightly earlier example on the first line of the soliloquy: "that is...
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@FulyaAdalıerCanbolat Not Old English, but Early Modern English; Old English is pre-1100.
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Not usually. Check your spam filter maybe? Otherwise, if it doesn't come, send me an email (a.hardie at lancaster.ac.uk) telling me your username and I'll look into it.
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Arguably, that's what she *thinks* she is, but in the event she turns out to be a lot less ruthless than she though she was.
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Andrew Hardie replied to Bala Balaraman
Don't hesitate to post questions if you run into problems. We might not get to them quickly, since we're outside the course's main period, but we WILL respond.
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Andrew Hardie replied to Rosemary McCall
@BalaBalaraman People who are a bit computer-phobic have gone through the course skipping the practical computer bits and just watching the videos to see what the results are - it's fine to go through this way if that's what you prefer.
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Almost certainly references to Shakespeare.
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Hi Phillip, the MOOC is not in session at present, and is being looked after by a skeleton staff (just me!) so sorry if there are delays in responding to requests for help.
You're not expected to know what Corpus Linguistics is at this step of the MOOC - don't worry, it's introduced and explained as you go on.
For your reference: corpus linguistics is...
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It's a code for Adjective.
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Alas, none of your examples involve the use of DO as an auxiliary!
As well as the auxiliary uses (negatives, questions, emphasis), DO can also be a main verb, in which case it means "take some action". That's happening in your examples:
What to DO?
What a nasty thing to DO.
I will DO.In each, DO is a stand-in for an unspecified action performed....
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@LizD Just to clarify, the point isn't that the highest class don't use *loanwords* from Latin. They do! Lots. There's no reason to think that Latin loanwords unconnected to religion would have had unwelcome associations with Catholicism. Rather, it's actually speaking *in Latin*, for either a short phrase or a full sentence, that we don't see the very highest...
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There's a link to a document on the complete syntax underneath the query box -- next to the Query Mode" control.
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Actually, that would be "thou livest and thou learnest!" It's the -st ending that goes with 2nd person singular.
The -th ending is an alternative to -s used with he/she/it. So, "she liveth and she learneth". Or even, "one liveth and one learneth".
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That's a somewhat different use of "do"!
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Have a look at Love's Labour's Lost, the speech of the character Holofernes - you'll see he uses both the little words and more substantial words from Latin - it's a major way he is characterised as a learned chap (and a bit of an intellectual snob). This will clarify the point a lot I think!
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@PatriciaCattley If you are having problems that the suggestions I posted in that earlier comment (link above) haven't helped with, can I suggest you report the issue to FutureLearn tech support? They have more insight into video problems than me...
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The main codes are: N V ADJ ADV.
The full set is in the "simple query" document - linked under the search box.
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An intriguing idea. Unfortunately, the radical stylistic differences between drama *as a genre* then and drama as a genre now would probably make the results of such an analysis very difficult to interpret reliably.
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We should also distinguish between "speaking LAtin" and "using Latin loanwords". The latter was common in English at this period; everyone, incl. Will himself and his characters, used such words; the question is whether WS was the first one to make the loan; for some of them, he might have been.
Speaking the Latin language, OTOH, was far rarer in society...
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Latin was a standard part of a basic education, and WS's family, though not aristocratic, weren't peasants either, so he almost certainly went to grammar school and studied Latin. The "grammar" in "grammar school" originally meant Latin grammar, after all...
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Andrew Hardie replied to Ray DUNN
Personally, I *like* "gobsmacked".
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Plenty of words from Arabic go back centuries; alcohol, algebra, etc. Likewise Indian languages: jungle, catamaran, thug, shampoo, cot etc. Today, English is overwhelmingly more likely to be a loan donor, rather than recipient, than it was in prior periods. New loans in English stand out because they tend to be for novel things/concepts - not because their...
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Andrew Hardie replied to Salma Chi
True - but note it's not Old English but Early Modern English. Old English is about 500 years older, and has to be learnt like a foreign language as it is so different to Modern English.
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Hi Mary, if you're having technical issues with the videos, this comment I posted a while back may be of help:
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Check again - you'll find Tolkien is following the archaic English practice with "thou"; he uses it mostly as pure singular, not reverential (alternatively, in Lord of the Rings, it distinguishes different dialects - the hobbit dialect has no "thou" , but the Gondor dialect does distinguish pl "you" / sg "thou"). Tolkien was a noted scholar of Old English and...
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There are also a pile of technical / scientific words in various European languages beginning in "al-" which derive from Arabic (algebra, alcohol, alchemy, etc.)
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Arabic is unrelated to English, German, etc. It's an Afroasiatic language, whereas English is an Indo-European language.
You might still find some familiar words, though, because there are words that English has *borrowed* from Arabic, and vice versa.
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Can you describe the problem you're having in a bit more detail? I need more info to try to fix it for you.
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@KathyH What I was getting at is that to say that anything is overused, we have to have an idea of the reference point.
You're certainly right that "that" is used in places where it could theoretically be omitted. Sometimes this has an identifiable function in that it reduces ambiguity (by making the clause boundary explicit rather implicit). In other...
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Andrew Hardie replied to Kathy H
It meant "illegitimate child" in the sense of one whose parents weren't married.
It still has that meaning today, but it's a *secondary* meaning. The primary meaning *today* is simply an insult, IE "bad person".
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The technical explanation: "be" only forms the perfect with *intransitive* verbs. With transitive verbs, it forms the passive instead, as you point out. But intransitive verbs don't passivise. So the equivalent form was able to be interpreted as perfect instead. Transitive verbs have always formed the perfect with "have".
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@KathyH Overused compared to what?
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Hi @MaurizioSchirone, what specifically is the problem?
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Shallow has the etymology right, but "accommodated" predates Shakespeare quite a bit (early 1500s).
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Andrew Hardie replied to Rachel Frith
Hi @RachelFrith, this sounds like a technical issue - the best thing to do is to report it to FutureLearn's support staff.
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Andrew Hardie replied to Edward Thompson
Not really, beyond them both being Early Modern English. The genres are very different, there's the effect of translation, plus the style used by the KJB was archaic even by the standards of the time (influenced by earlier translations).
Of course, speakers of EModE didn't need to go to either church or the theatre to hear EModE, as it was spoken all...
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Well the setting of Macbeth is Scotland in the early part of the High Middle Ages: the real king that the character is based on, Mac Bethad (whom Shakespeare's Macbeth resembles not one whit!), ruled Scotland from 1040 to 1057.
But, generally speaking, Shakespeare is very rarely bothered about period accuracy (e.g. putting clocks in Julius Caesar, more...
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Andrew Hardie replied to Rosemary C
Hi Rosemary, just posting in case you don't see my other answer on FL site tech matters; I suggest you take a look here -- https://www.futurelearn.com/comments/63464108
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Hi Rosemary, this is an issue that we don't have any ability to fix as "educators"; it only affects some people, and I am not at all clear on why, as the people who have reported problems were not doing anything different to the people who had no problems.
if you report the issue to the FutureLearn staff, they may be able to help. In the meantime, I've put...
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You're correct, but "Here you are" isn't an example of inversion as the verb is still after the subject. Instead, it's an example of fronting, which is a different kind of re-ordering.
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In CQPweb, subcorpora aren't physically created as separate collections of text. The system just keeps track of which parts of the complete corpus you are using in that subcorpus.
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I know what you mean, but I don't think "not fully-formed" is the best choice of terminology. It gives the wrong impression of the situation in Early Modern English, which was not in any sense incomplete as a language (to the extent that completion as a concept makes sense applied to languages).
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Andrew Hardie replied to Dr Graham Smith
@DrGrahamSmith belated followup: I didn't see that email myself, so I asked the team to check it had been received. They located it and are going to reply I believe.
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Read some of the earlier comments on this page and you'll see that the frequencies noted are due to a **very** small number of texts. The extent to which we can validly assert a relationship to contemporary events is limited by this factor.
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Courtly love isn't really a Renaissance thing; it's much more a literary trend of the High Middle Ages (1100 to 1400 roughly). Of course Shakespeare was familiar with the notion, and it does indeed pop up in his plays. Some critics have argued that Romeo's love for Rosaline represents courtly love, but his love for Juliet is a realer, better type of love. If...
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Andrew Hardie replied to Emerson S
Technically, the form of English is called "Early Modern English"; Old English is the language of England before about 1100, so five hundred years plus before Shakespeare. Old English is so different from Modern English that it has to be learned like a foreign language; Early Modern English is clearly the same language that we speak today, but with many...
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Andrew Hardie replied to Laurence Scott
I'm familiar with the research in question and I would urge caution about the link to dementia, about which much was made in the media reporting around the analysis. Certainly AC's style changed over time but implying brain degeneration is a bigger step, to my mind, than the textual evidence permits. It's not a *bad* speculation but it's no more than that - a...
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This is an overstatement. One of the unfortunate things about very major figures is that, as well as the praise they merit, they tend to also attract other praise too. But Shakespeare had little to no impact on spelling or grammar, and his impact on vocabulary was less than is often claimed. I'm not sure why some people seem to think "being a really, *really*...
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@CeliaGasgil Also in some non-standard spoken dialects (that of my own hometown included). Generally the more old-fashioned ones. In literature, it's not just poetry, you'll find it in modern fiction that wants to give a character an archaic tone.
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I think you need to adjust "most idioms" to "some idioms" in that assessment!
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@StephenEvans You might not have noticed the date, but this is a very old conversation, and there is no need to bring it back to life; the issue Ken was alluding to has been addressed extensively elsewhere.
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If you email me with more details about what you have done and what step it failed at, I'll look into it.
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@CeliaGasgil They are present in the first printed versions. That they come from WS himself is not entirely certain (could have been added to the MS copies by other hands during rehearsals, for instance) but not improbable.
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Andrew Hardie replied to Ian Todd
It may have to do with genre of the texts you are looking at, e.g. (dramatic) poetry vs prose?
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Andrew Hardie replied to Jae-Hee Suh
Yes, in Korean it's a neologism, but in English it's a loanword.
The term "new" is, of course, always relative. It's not a technical term, there's not a precise definition. It depends.
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Your first sentence captures the central point - yes.
But "words that assist understanding of sentence" is something else. If somebody calls that a "keyword", then they are using a different meaning of that term than the one we're talking about here.
A keyword in the corpus-based sense *might* also be important to the understanding of the sentences...
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Andrew Hardie replied to Noelene Beckett Crowe..
@NoeleneBeckettCrowe.. In my part of the world, "gasping" is used by smokers to describe the state of being in desperate need of a cigarette, and that's what I thought your "gasspering" meant! Fascinating that it derives from "gossip" instead. Maybe influence from "gassing" in the sense of "talking" too?
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Andrew Hardie replied to Jae-Hee Suh
Alas @Jae-HeeSuh -- "mukbang" is already firmly established in English as a loanword, albeit somewhat specialised as a term of course. I recall first hearing this word at least 6 or 7 years ago, and the speakers using it then were treating it as a normal English word that didn't need any explaining to the hearer!
So this word got totally adopted into...
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hi @RayaMukherjee , if you don't get the email after a few hours (and after double checking it is not in your spam filter!) then feel free to drop me an email to ask me to investigate the problem. a.hardie@lancs.ac.uk
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@KathleenTurtle If that does happen it will be far from the first time a word fell out of use because phonetic change made it too easily confusable with another word!
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Andrew Hardie replied to Laurence Scott
I will put my hand up to that one. As a graphic designer, I make a good linguist. ;)
