I Am Shakespeare And So Can You

Some writers want to use the most straight­for­ward English in their work. So doing, a bur­den is lif­ted from the reader. Other writers struggle to cre­ate quite indi­vidual sen­tences that are fresh and unusual, but at the expense of ease.

From the blog Neurophilosophy comes word that research­ers are invest­ig­at­ing the effects on read­ers of a par­tic­u­lar sen­tence form called the func­tional shift. Why? Well, spe­cial cases of lan­guage — ambi­gu­ity, for example, or agram­mat­ic­al­ity — force the human sen­tence pro­cessing mech­an­ism to react in a novel way, and this some­times reveals how it works.

Functional shift hap­pens when a word is mis-classified and needs to be re-classified later in the sen­tence, when sub­sequent inform­a­tion dis­am­big­u­ates the structure.

Here’s an example from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (at least, I think it is; this is how I inter­pret it):

No, let the can­died tongue lick absurd pomp,
And crook the preg­nant hinges of the knee
Where thrift may fol­low fawn­ing. Dost thou hear?

The word ‘crook’ would be heard as a noun but later inform­a­tion forces a verb inter­pret­a­tion. It draws the listener towards the sen­tence. Its meta­phor burns brightly.

Philip Davis, Guillaume Thierry and Neil Roberts are invest­ig­at­ing how the brain responds to these func­tional shifts. They write:

[We found that] while the Shakespearian func­tional shift was semantic­ally integ­rated with ease, it triggered a syn­tactic re-evaluation pro­cess likely to raise atten­tion and extra emer­gent con­scious­ness, and giv­ing more power and sheer life to the sen­tence as a whole.

In this way Shakespeare is stretch­ing us, mak­ing us more alive, at a level of neural excitement…Our find­ings begin to show how Shakespeare cre­ated dra­matic effects by impli­citly tak­ing advant­age of the rel­at­ive inde­pend­ence — at the neural level — of semantics and syn­tax in sen­tence com­pre­hen­sion. It is as though he is a pian­ist using one hand to keep the back­ground melody going, whilst sim­ul­tan­eously the other pushes towards ever more com­plex vari­ations and syncopations.

This is some­thing to think about when writ­ing. Not all sen­tences should be gram­mat­ic­ally cor­rect. Grammaticality is another axis on which the writer should move freely, to some effect.

The PDF of the art­icle can be down­loaded here.