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As a young linguistics professor, I once had a woman come up to me after the first lecture of a course I was teaching. She let me know she wouldn’t be continuing with the class. She was a poet, she said by way of explanation, and thus was put off by the overly analytical approach to language she had just witnessed. She told me was not interested in “dissecting” language.
Since then, I have often encountered this attitude, as if a scientific way of thinking about language might choke off the source of creative inspiration. Perhaps it’s part of the greater sense that scientific and technological progress have led to a widespread disenchantment, as argued by the philosopher Max Weber, in which humans have lost access to nonrational modes of thought and to the emotions of awe and wonder that can well up in the face of mystery.
I have to say it has not been this way for me. The deeper study of language has been nothing if not enchanting. Much about the structure of language and the mental processes that accompany it is submerged beneath conscious awareness; learning about these has often felt like being invited into the hidden rooms of a lover’s soul. Far from demystifying language, the layers of complexity that I’ve discovered have only led to greater mystery.
And when I left the academy some years ago to turn my efforts to writing, I found that my scientific knowledge infused every aspect of my work, whether I was writing about language or anything else.
Projecting oneself into the mind of a reader is a challenge for all writers. My work as a language scientist lends me a detailed model of the reader’s mind that I could not have acquired through intuition alone. Human attention and memory are shockingly constrained, and when parsing a sentence, readers are at constant risk of running up against the limits of how much information they can keep active in their minds.
My awareness of these limits helps me understand why some sentences feel clumsy and others more graceful. It helps me smooth out the wrinkles in syntax that might mar a sentence such as “At the age of seventy, the great novelist accepted the Nobel Prize would never be within his grasp.” I know from my lab experiments that the reader’s eye is likely to stumble upon reading “would never be,” suggesting she had initially misread “the Nobel Prize” as the object of the verb “accepted” and is surprised to discover that it is in fact the subject of a new clause—and that this wrinkle is easily ironed out if “that” is inserted after “accepted” or if the verb is replaced with “knew.”
I know that attention falls on a sentence like a sunbeam, lighting up some words more than others, a phenomenon used to great effect by David Markson when he wrote: “Odious vermin, Henry Fielding called critics.”
I know that readers are expert pattern detectors who constantly make predictions about where the language is taking them; this gives me a sense of how to manage the tension between expectation and surprise.
And I’m aware that words on the page are a mere starting point to meaning, and this sharpens my sense of what can be left unsaid. “Brewster stabbed his victims with a knife” feels redundant, but “Brewster stabbed his victims with a Louboutin stiletto heel” does not. Knowing the mechanics of implication, I have a sense of the subtle border between beguiling enigma and bewildering non sequitur.
But more than all this, my study of language has tuned my attention in ways that amplify my pleasure of it.
The time I’ve spent “dissecting” the sounds of speech has made me more alert to the cadences and mouthfeel of words. Understanding how the syntactic bones of a sentence fit together deepens my appreciation for an elegant composition of clauses and phrases, conscious of the set of alternative arrangements that would not have achieved the same effect. Attuned to language’s patterns and regularities, I feel an extra jolt of delight when I read a sentence that achieves something out of the ordinary.
And what other domain of scientific knowledge could possibly illuminate the human condition as well as the study of language? Language is entangled with every aspect of our lives. It is at once capacious and fragile, constrained by our own mental limits. The way in which it is learned in childhood speaks to our urgent need for human connection and the ways in which it fails us reveals how vulnerable we are to the loneliness of being misunderstood. The scientific insights I’ve gained in my research life provide me with endless inspiration as a writer.
When I think back to the poet who was put off by my class, I feel saddened to think that she never reaped the same rewards. I thought of her the entire time as I was writing Linguaphile, which is the culmination of my life’s work as a language scientist and writer, turning over in my mind what I wish I had been able to say to her, and how I would have liked to have said it. I wanted to write a book not only about my relationship to language, but a book that embodied that relationship.
I hope it finds its way to her.
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Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love by Julie Sedivy is available now via Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
