SHAKESPEARE’S LATE SYNTAX: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF WHICH RELATIVISATION IN THE DRAMATIC WORKS by Jacqueline E. Mullender A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English College of Arts and Law The University of Birmingham June 2010 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT This thesis combines corpus stylistic, literary and historical linguistic approaches to test critical observations about the language of Shakespeare‟s late plays. It finds substantial evidence of increased syntactic complexity, and identifies significant linguistic differences between members of the wider group of later plays. Chapter One outlines the critical history of the late works, including consideration of stylometric approaches to Shakespeare‟s language. Chapter Two describes the stylistic methodology and corpus techniques employed. Chapter Three reports the finding of salient which frequency in the late plays, and details the analytical categories to be used in the examination of which usage, the results of which are discussed in Chapter Four. Chapter Five describes two further analyses, where a broader group of ten late plays is considered on the basis of their high which frequency. The relativisation syntax of the five post-1608 plays (Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen) is found to distinguish them unequivocally as a group, while Pericles stands out as an anomaly. Finally, in Chapter Six it is argued that Shakespeare‟s syntax reflects a stylistic phenomenon unrelated to individual dramatic characterisation, motivated by his re-association with the Elizabethan romance writers of the sixteenth century. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My thanks first and foremost go to Professor Michael Toolan, for his support, enthusiasm and insight during my postgraduate studies at Birmingham. I am also very grateful to the following: The Arts and Humanities Research Council, for their financial support of this project; Dr. Catherine Alexander and Professor Kate McLuskie at the Shakespeare Institute, for their interest and encouragement; Dr. Martin Wiggins, for his rigorous responses to various presentations of this research; Dr. Jonathan Culpeper, Dr. Paul Rayson, Dr. Mike Scott, Professor Sylvia Adamson and Dr. Dawn Archer, for their kind help at workshops and conferences, and early access to forthcoming articles; Caroline Tagg and Garry Plappert, for their rating work and insightful feedback, and the other research postgraduates in Language at the University of Birmingham, who taught me a great deal. Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends for their kind tolerance of my neglect of them during this research. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1: The Late Plays: Literary Critical Background 1.0 General remarks……………………………………………………………………. 1 1.1 The late plays: group identity……………………………………………………… 2 1.2 The language of the late plays………………………………………………………11 1.3 Authorship attribution studies…………………………………………………....... 21 1.4 Summary…………………………………………………………………………… 32 Chapter 2: Methodology and Method 2.0 General remarks……………………………………………………………………. 34 2.1 Stylistics……………………………………………………………………………. 35 2.2 Corpus stylistics……………………………………………………………………. 38 2.3 Method…………………………………………………………………………….. 42 Chapter 3: Analysing the Corpora 3.0 General comments…………………………………………………………………..49 3.1 The prominence of which in the late plays………………………………………….51 3.2 Paradigmatic analysis……………………………………………………………….56 3.3 Syntagmatic analysis……………………………………………………………….. 71 3.3.1 Main functions of which…………………………………………………… 74 3.3.2 Antecedents…………………………………………………………………76 3.3.2.1 Types of relative clause according to antecedent……………….. 76 3.3.2.2 The animacy parameter………………………………………….. 80 3.3.2.3 Distance from the relative……………………………………….. 81 3.3.2.4 Word groups intervening to the left……………………………. 86 3.3.3 The information parameter………………………………………………… 89 3.3.3.1 Restrictive and non-restrictive clauses…………………………. 89 3.3.3.2 Continuative clauses……………………………………………. 98 3.3.4 The role of which in the relative clause…………………………………… 118 3.3.4.1 Nominal roles…………………………………………………… 118 3.3.4.2 Which as prepositional complement……………………………. 120 3.3.4.3 Relativiser-only which………………………………………….. 120 3.3.4.4 Cataphoric which……………………………………………….. 125 3.3.4.5 Pushdown constructions………………………………………... 126 3.3.4.6 Recursions………………………………………………………. 131 3.3.5 Interventions to the right of which………………………………………… 135 3.3.5.1 The number of words intervening to the right………………….. 135 3.3.5.2 Word groups intervening to the right…………………………… 140 3.3.6 Clausal length……………………………………………………………… 144 Chapter 4: Results and Discussion 4.0 General remarks……………………………………………………………………. 153 4.1 Main functions of which…………………………………………………………… 154 4.2 Antecedents……………………………………………………………………….. 157 4.2.1 Types of relative clause according to antecedent…………………………. 157 4.2.2 The animacy parameter……………………………………………………. 164 4.2.3 Distance from the relative…………………………………………………. 166 4.2.4 Word groups intervening to the left………………………………………. 168 4.3 The information parameter………………………………………………………… 172 4.3.1 Overall statistics.…………………………………………………………… 172 4.3.2 Continuative clauses.………………………………………………………. 175 4.4 The role of which in the relative clause.…………………………………………… 178 4.5 Interventions to the right of which…..…………………………………………….. 190 4.5.1 The number of words intervening to the right...…………………………… 190 4.5.2 Word groups intervening to the right.…..………………………………….. 191 4.6 Clausal length…………………………..………….………………………………..201 4.7 Summary of findings for the late plays corpus………………..…………………… 203 Chapter 5: Additional Perspectives 5.1 A new late group?......................................................................................................207 5.2 Findings for the new late group…………………………………………………….212 5.3 The individual plays………………………………………………………………...218 5.4 Chapter summary…………………………………………………………………...229 Chapter 6: Conclusions 6.1 Review of method……………………………….………………………………… 232 6.2 Overview of findings…………………………………………...………………….. 238 6.3 Related studies………………………………………………………………………249 6.4 Further interpretation………………………………………………………………. 254 6.4.1 General comments…………...…………………………………………….. 254 6.4.2 The dramatic function of complexity………………………………………. 254 6.4.3 The Elizabethan revival……………….…………………………………… 259 Appendices 1 Non-Shakespearean material removed from the corpora………………..……….… 313 2 Wordlists (earlier and late plays)…………...………………………….……………cd 3 Keyword list for the late plays………………………………………………..……. 315 4 Keyword list for the late plays (Excel table with full data)……...………………… cd 5 Paradigmatic statistics……………………………………………………...………. 316 6 Paradigmatic relatives: all concordances…….…………………………………….. cd 7 Concordances for which (earlier and late plays)…………………………………… cd 8 List of which occurrences given to raters………………………………………….. cd 9 Tables of results for the analysis of the „new late group‟…………………………..270 10 Tables of results for the analysis of the individual plays…………………………...281 10 The reconstructed Pericles text: principal differences from Craig (1914)…………318 Bibliography...................................................................................................................... 321 LIST OF TABLES Chapter 3 3.1 The late plays: top 49 keywords................................................................................ ..52 3.2 “Overall survey of relativisers in Modern English” (Dekeyser 1984, 64)……….… ..61 3.3 Dekeyser‟s survey of relativisers (1984, 64) without zeros………………………….64 3.4 Raw frequency and proportion of relatives in Shakespeare…….…………………....65 3.5 Proportion of running tokens that are relatives in Shakespeare……………………...66 3.6 Shakespeare‟s relatives: raw and relative frequencies of types ……..………………67 3.7 Shakespeare‟s relatives: proportion of each type that function as relatives…………68 3.8 “Relativisation correlated with register” (Dekeyser 1988, 31)…………….………. .69 3.9 Wh- forms and that in Shakespeare‟s earlier and late plays……..………………… .70 3.10 Rating results: divergent ascriptions.......................................................................... 111 Chapter 4 4.1 Main functions of which............................................................................................ 156 4.2 Types of relative clause according to antecedent……………………….…………. 164 4.3 “The de-humanization of (THE) WHICH” (Dekeyser 1984, 71)…………………..165 4.4 The animacy parameter……………………………………………………………. 165 4.5 Distance between antecedent and relative…………………………………………. 167 4.6 Word groups intervening to the left........................................................................... 171 4.7 The information parameter........................................................................................ 174 4.8 Analysis of continuative clauses................................................................................ 177 4.9 The role of which in the relative clause: principal functions....................................