Description
Book SynopsisA groundbreaking study of how abstract linguistic signs circulate in literature, intellectual history, and popular culture. Linguistic forms are essential to meaning: like words, they make a semantic contribution to the things we say. We inherit them from past writers and speakers and fill them with different words to produce novel utterances. They shape us and the ways we interpret the world. Yet prevalent assumptions about language and the constraints of print-finding tools have kept linguistic forms and their histories hidden from view. Drawing on recent work in cognitive and construction grammar along with tools and methods developed by corpus and computational linguists, Daniel Shore's Cyberformalism represents a new way forward for digital humanities scholars seeking to understand the textual past. Championing a qualitative approach to digital archives, Shore uses the abstract pattern-matching capacities of search engines to explore precisely those combinatory aspects of langua
Trade ReviewObjections such as these open theoretical cans of worms — yet they also validate Shore's project, simply by reflecting his deep engagement with ultimate humanistic concerns. Cyberformalism acknowledges that the subjective contemplation and discussion of meanings and values is not just one disposable strand in humanities research; instead, it is paramount to the philologist's vocation. . . Many of us will then thank Daniel Shore for having set forth a vision of the digital humanities that puts the human first, the data science second, rather than the other way around.
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Los Angeles Review of BooksShore's charge that we move from investigating discrete linguistic signs to combinatory linguistic forms is illuminating and will appeal to general readers as well as those specifically interested in digital humanities, English literary history, theology, grammar, and linguistics . . . Shore's scholarly range in this book is tremendous. He moves from contemporary digital technology to constructivist grammar to the niceties of seventeenth-century theology with ease, and so does the reader.
—Daniel DeWispelare, George Washington University,
Modern PhilologyThis is exciting work: Shore's process of discovery reads, in part, as detective fiction . . . The method outlined and the conclusions Shore draws are convincing: this is a smart piece of research which may be the first in a new generation of works in computational literary studies—works which are more humanized, and which foreground both the text and the reader.
—Yann Ciaran Ryan, Queen Mary University of London,
Modern Language ReviewTable of ContentsPreface
Acknowledgements
1. Linguistic Forms
2. Search
3. “Was It For This?” and the Study of Influence
4. Act As If and Useful Fictions
5. WWJD? and the History of Imitatio Christi
6. Milton’s Depictives and the History of Style
7. Shakespeare’s Constructicon
8. God is Dead, Long Live Philology
Notes
Index
