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CORPUS TOOLS AND THE LINGUISTIC STUDY OF IDEOLOGY:
SEARCHING FOR FASCISM IN ATLAS SHRUGGED
by
CADMUS KYRALA
A dissertation submitted to the School of Humanities of the University of Birmingham in part fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics (App Ling)
This dissertation consists of approximately 12,000 words Supervisor: Alexanne Don
Centre for English Language Studies Department of English University of Birmingham Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT United Kingdom
July 2009
This dissertation is dedicated to my wife Eiko.
Without her patience, love, and understanding I could not have written it.
CONTENTS
- CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
- CHAPTER 2 THE LINGUISTIC STUDY OF IDEOLOGY
- CHAPTER 3 USING CORPUS TOOLS AND CDA TO DETECT
- CHAPTER 4 LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS FOR ELEMENTS OF IDEOLOGY
- 4.1 Nationalism FASCIST IDEOLOGY
- 4.2 Racism
- 4.3 Xenophobia
- 4.4 Strong State / Anti-democracy
- 4.4.1 Law & Order
- 4.4.2 Militarism
- 4.4.3 Anti-pluralism and Anti-democracy
- 4.5 Agentless Processes (Ergative Verbs and the Passive Voice)
- 4.6 Negation
- 4.7 Summary
- CHAPTER 5 VALIDITY AND RELEVANCE
- 5.1 A Valid Basis of Comparison
- 5.2 How this study contributes to the debate over
- CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSION Atlas Shrugged
- APPENDIX 1 Full List of Texts Used in Nazi Corpus
- APPENDIX 2 Full Frequency List of Terms Relating to Nationalism
- APPENDIX 3 Full Frequency List of Terms Relating to Racism
- APPENDIX 4 Full Frequency List of Terms Relating to Xenophobia
- APPENDIX 5 Full Frequency List of Terms Relating to the Strong State /
- REFERENCES Anti-democracy
- TABLE 1 Frequency List of Significant Terms Relating to Nationalism LIST OF TABLES
- TABLE 2 Collocation Pattern for “country” in AS
- TABLE 3 Concordance lines of “best” and “country” in AS
- TABLE 4 Collocation Pattern for “country” in NC
- TABLE 5 Concordance lines of “love” and “country” in NC
- TABLE 6 Concordance lines of “mother” and “country” in NC
- TABLE 7 Frequency List of Significant Terms Relating to Racism
- TABLE 8 Eye colors and Character Nature
- TABLE 9 Frequency List of Significant Terms Relating to Xenophobia
- TABLE 10 Frequency List of Significant Terms Relating to Strong State /
- TABLE 11 Concordance lines of “order” in AS Anti-democracy Element
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
Ayn Rand‟s Atlas Shrugged (1957) (henceforth AS) has been the subject of a great deal of controversy since its publication in 1957. Since initial allegations of masking a fascist ideology (Chambers 1957), and despite a series of philosophical and political rebuttals (Uyl & Rasmussen 1984; Tracinski 2005, Berliner 2007) the charges of fascism remain noticeably active as evidenced by a variety of recent reviews of the work in the general media and on the Internet (Cline 2006, Teachout 2007, Larner 2007, Gibson 2009). In the context of this controversy, it seemed appropriate to analyze AS and search for any linguistic elements that could give rise to such an impression. What follows is a corpus based analysis of the linguistic features of the book with a specific focus on examining claims of the presence of fascist ideology in the text of Ayn Rand‟s Atlas Shrugged (1957). It is hoped that this analysis may help to inform a model of examining literary texts for ideology.
Chapter 2 provides a brief history of the study of ideology in the field of linguistics. The academic foundations of the use of corpus analysis to assist in the ideological analysis of texts are traced from Saussure‟s initial definitions of the interplay between society and individual actors in the creation of language to recent studies which attempt to incorporate Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with corpus technology to aid in the detection of specific ideological trends. It is suggested that there is substantial theoretical support to justify the use of corpus tools to search for key structural elements that may, upon closer inspection, reveal ideology inherent in a given text.
Chapter 3 will explain the method of the analysis. AS was compared to a generally representative corpus of the English language. In order to form a baseline of comparison, a corpus of Nazi texts was also compiled and compared against the same general corpus. Words which appeared at a significantly higher frequency in either AS or the Nazi corpus (hereafter
then assessed.
It would seem that corpus analysis is not sufficient in itself to provide a thorough picture of the ideology of a text. However, it can provide clues as to patterns of preoccupation in choice of lexis, which can lead to the investigation of lexis in context to determine the sense in which it is used. Corpus analysis can also inform about collocational patterns which may be invisible to a traditional literary analysis. Finally it can assist in the statistical analysis of structural features dependent on specific lexical items. The results of corpus analysis do not, however, directly inform as to the veracity of an ideology, something which can only be assessed in a primarily philosophical and not linguistic argument. Nevertheless, corpus tools can provide leads to follow which, having been examined in context, can then enable us to readily determine what ideological features are presented and confirm or deny the existence of a given ideology in a given text. This, of course, assumes that both an accepted definition of the ideology is available and that a corpus of texts representative of that ideology is available for cross-comparison. Having analyzed AS in this manner, and using the NC as a representative comparison, it is argued that fascist ideology while confirmed in the NC is seemingly not present in AS. It is hoped that studies of this kind may provide relatively objective tools to assess the ideology of controversial texts.
CHAPTER 2: THE LINGUISTIC STUDY OF IDEOLOGY
The history of modern linguistics is intricately connected with the study of ideology. This chapter will attempt to justify the theoretical foundations of the current study in terms of the history of the involvement of linguistics research in ideological studies. Of specific importance is the justification of using corpus analysis to expose the ideology of a text and the conditions under which it is acceptable to do so. Consequently, the theoretical lineage of ideas which support such studies is also necessary. It is argued that the current study is compatible both with current research into the coordination of corpus analysis with CDA and the broader scope of linguistic studies of ideological content. A review of these studies would seem to indicate the framework for a model of analysis which may provide insight into the ideological content of a text. This may be an especially useful tool in cases where the ideology expressed by a given text is the subject of controversy, as in AS.
Recently, Baker, et al. (2008) have advocated a synergy between critical discourse analysis (CDA) and corpus linguistics. Building off of a series of recent ideological studies of discourse incorporating corpus tools (Baker 2004; Baker & McEnery 2005; Orpin 2005; McEnery 2006), they utilized a combination of corpus linguistics and CDA to analyze a large corpus of newspaper articles for ideological perspectives of refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, and migrants (RASIM). They verified that the corpus analysis complemented the results of the CDA analysis and in fact expanded upon it by revealing the presence of positive minority views of RASIM, whereas the CDA analysis did not (Baker, et al. 2008). They also made specific recommendations for the role of corpus linguistics in CDA. They suggest that corpus linguistics can be used to “provide a general „pattern map‟” of a large volume of data. First, it can provide information on which lexical items appear at a disproportionate frequency as compared to a general corpus. These keywords can then be checked for collocations which
In 1929, Valentin Voloshinov criticized Saussure for ignoring the ideological nature of signs. He emphasized the Marxist school of thought which interpreted language in terms of class struggle. “ „refracted‟ by them…No speech act is individual; they are always social, even if the addressee existsSigns are ideological by their very nature, and social existence is not merely reflected in them but only in the speaker‟s imagination” (Joseph 2006: 65). This idea was highly influential in the development of the study of ideology in language, but his writings were not largely available outside the Soviet Union until the 1960s by which time other researchers had reached similar conclusions independently (Joseph 2006: 65). The social semantics of J.R. Firth, for example, dealt with the analysis of meaning in words. “the complete meaning of a word is always contextual, and no study of meaning apart from a completecontext can be taken seriously” (Firth 1935 in Stubbs 1996: 53). Stubbs notes that a major criticism of corpus linguistics has been the claim that a corpus cannot give insight into meaning. He claims that “Firth‟s notion of meaning as a function in context, and more specifically the concept of collocation” has been a “connecting thread” between traditional semantic analysis and the modern use of corpora (Stubbs 1996: 35). Voloshinov and Firth provide the links between the meaning of the words used and the context in which they are used. Their work suggests that the full meaning of any given word can only be understood in the context of its appearance, that understanding the social situation in which an utterance comes to be has a direct effect on the meaning encoded by that utterance. The groundwork was thus set to examine the pattern of co-occurrence of words, or collocations.
Whereas this previous research suggested that the pattern of word use and semantic structure had a mutually influential interaction with social structure to some degree, it was not until the formulation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in the 1950s that serious attention was
paid to the extent to which language and thought influence each other. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis can essentially be reduced to the question, “Does language shape thought?” While there are still many controversies surrounding this proposition, research does indicate that habitual patterns of language use have a limited effect on how people think of certain concepts (Casasanto 2008). The converse of this hypothesis, „Does thought shape language?‟ would seem to be a given. However, of special concern to this study is the extent to which thought shapes unconscious language choice. To what extent are the patterns of word choice in a text reflective of the thought process of the author? If an author holds a certain ideology, even secretly, to what extent will the presence of that ideology, as an internalized system of thought, influence the author‟s word choices? Will this affect collocation patterns? Will it be represented in the author‟s strategic choices to represent processes and participants?
Erving Goffman‟s research into “face” led him to claim “a functional relationship between the structure of self and the structure of spoken interaction” (Goffman 1955 in Joseph 2006: 67). While this also seems reminiscent of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Goffman‟s research focused mainly on spoken discourse, the relevance to the current study lies in his observations on how ideological information could be transferred by relatively innocuous elements of communication. “The human tendency to use signs and symbols means that evidence of social worth and of mutual evaluations will be conveyed by very minor things, and these things will be witnessed, as will the fact that they have been witnessed. An unguarded glance, a momentary change in tone of voice, an ecological position taken or not taken, can drench a talk with judgmental significance” (Goffman 1955 in Joseph 2006: 67). With the advent of Critical Discourse Analysis, Foucalt, Fairclough, Lemke, among others, further developed the analysis of ideology by maintaining that grammatical and lexical patterns in discourse are indicative of “which meanings are repeatedly expressed in a discourse community” (Stubbs 1996: 158). They held the view that the regular use of patterns which “embody particular social values” could inform the researcher of social values encoded
that we know someone was injured and that we wanted then to look for passivizations of words like hurt or injured. If we are not aware of which actions are referred to in the text (for example if we are studying a large corpus of data), then it may be less readily apparent what it is we should be searching for.
In the current study, nominalization was not investigated due to the lack of specifically representative lexis for which to search. However, passivization was readily searchable due to the fixed form of be-verb + past participle. All instances of the be-verb in various tenses were identified using a concordancer. The results were narrowed down to those accompanying a past participle and finally checked to verify that only instances of the passive voice remained. The remaining concordance lines were then examined in context to determine if the function of the passive voice was to conceal agency in such a way as to mask ideology. In this way, while the analysis was not wholly dependent on corpus tools, corpus analysis did provide information which enabled a more thorough and efficient assessment of the author‟s semantic strategies.
Another linguistic feature that has been recognized as indicating ideology, at least in regards to racism, is negation. Van Dijk (1992) observed that “even the most blatantly racist discourse in our data routinely features denials or at least mitigations of racism.” Pagano further supports this by addressing the use of implicit denials. “The fact that they make no reference to an explicit proposition, however, does not mean that they appear out of the blue, without any connection at all to the topic being developed. They occur because there must be some reason why the writer feels the need to use a negative” (Pagano 1994). This, too, unfortunately suffers from some of the same problems as the idea of searching for passivizations and nominalizations. A corpus search for key forms of negation like „no‟ and „not‟ could be performed, but the frequency of these terms may threaten to inundate the researcher in data. In the current study, a corpus search of AS did produce a
massive amount of data. These negative terms produced no significant collocations which suggested fascism. But as that may have simply been a failure of method, the resulting concordances were also manually checked to ascertain the ideological content of the use of negation. There appeared to be no concealed ideology represented by these features beyond that explicitly present in the novel. Once again, while corpus data enabled a certain narrowing of the field, conscious appraisal on the part of the researcher was also required to make final judgments about the ideological import of these features.
As Fowler (1996: 9) reminds us, “Significance (ideology) cannot simply be read off the linguistic forms that description has identified in the text, because the same form (nominalization, for example) has different significances in different contexts.” That is to say that even if we do know which nominalizations to look for, we would then have to investigate their concordances to determine if we are looking at a proper representation of the frequency and usage of words being used in the appropriate sense. In the case of relatively frequent words, it may be prohibitively time-consuming to sort the false positives from the truly significant data. At the very least, examining these elements would require a more traditional approach to analysis. In the current study, a mixed methodology combining aspects of both corpus analysis and CDA was used. Corpus analysis was used to isolate significant elements followed by conscious appraisal of significant concordances in context. This combined approach enabled the relatively time-efficient appraisal of AS, a massive text at over a thousand pages. Clearly, corpus analysis by itself is not sufficient to analysing a text for ideology. It must also be accompanied by attention to the context of utterances.
Drawing off the work of Sperber and Wilson, Fengyuan (2004) enumerates four ways in which contexts facilitate the interpretation of meaning. First, context helps to disambiguate words, like „he‟s hot !‟ as opposed to „It‟s hot today‟. Secondly, it helps determine
of fascist ideology where the fascist corpus did, then AS should be free of such ideology. In the final analysis, AS did not present any such indicators of a fascist ideology. The method whereby this was determined will be described in further detail in Chapter 3 and the analysis itself in Chapter 4.
CHAPTER 3: USING CORPUS TOOLS AND CDA TO DETECT IDEOLOGY
“I am advocating that we should trust the teximpose our ideas on it, except perhaps just to get started. We should only apply loose and flexiblet. We should be open to what it may tell us. We should not frameworks until we see what the preliminary results are in order to accommodate the new informationthat will come from the text. We should expect that we will encounter unusual phenomena; we should accept that a large part of our linguistic behaviour is subliminal, and therefore we may find a lot ofsurprises. We should search for models that are specifically appropriate to the study of texts and discourse.” (Sinclair 1992) In the spirit of this quote from Sinclair, preconceptions of both fascism and Rand‟s work were to be avoided as much as possible. The first problem was to discover a description of fascism which could provide clues as to concepts to test for in Rand‟s work. In order to assess claims of fascism, it was first necessary to assess what, exactly, fascism is. Mudde (1995) conducted a survey of definitions of right-wing extremist movements in the academic literature and identified general agreement on five key elements of fascism: nationalism, racism, xenophobia, dedication to a strong state, and anti-democracy. The strong state element was further distinguished as consisting of militarism, a focus on maintaining law and order, and anti-pluralism. For the purposes of this analysis, anti-democracy and the strong state elements have been conflated due to the overlap between anti-pluralism and anti-democracy. Mudde cautions against overgeneralization, but he paid special attention to conceptualizing the terms of his definition thereby greatly reducing potential ambiguity. Also, since his work is based on a broad synthesis of academic definitions, the elements he proposed seemed to present a potentially objective definition of such ideology. As such it would be ideally suited for use as an inventory of items to search for in AS. The problem was to form a suitable model that would allow Rand‟s work to be tested for these ideological components.
Starting with Mudde‟s (1995) elements of fascism, there seemed to be no alternative but to brainstorm words which could reasonably be thought to express the elements of nationalism, racism, xenophobia, and the strong state. However, it would not be sufficient simply to search AS for these terms without first trying to validate their usage in fascist
