Crowdsourcing language change with smartphone applications

Crowdsourcing linguistic phenomena with smartphone applications is relatively new. In linguistics, apps have predominantly been developed to create pronunciation dictionaries, to train acoustic models, and to archive endangered languages. This paper presents the first account of how apps can be used to collect data suitable for documenting language change: we created an app, Dialäkt Äpp (DÄ), which predicts users’ dialects. For 16 linguistic variables, users select a dialectal variant from a drop-down menu. DÄ then geographically locates the user’s dialect by suggesting a list of communes where dialect variants most similar to their choices are used. Underlying this prediction are 16 maps from the historical Linguistic Atlas of German-speaking Switzerland, which documents the linguistic situation around 1950. Where users disagree with the prediction, they can indicate what they consider to be their dialect’s location. With this information, the 16 variables can be assessed for language change. Thanks to the playfulness of its functionality, DÄ has reached many users; our linguistic analyses are based on data from nearly 60,000 speakers. Results reveal a relative stability for phonetic variables, while lexical and morphological variables seem more prone to change. Crowdsourcing large amounts of dialect data with smartphone apps has the potential to complement existing data collection techniques and to provide evidence that traditional methods cannot, with normal resources, hope to gather. Nonetheless, it is important to emphasize a range of methodological caveats, including sparse knowledge of users’ linguistic backgrounds (users only indicate age, sex) and users’ self-declaration of their dialect. These are discussed and evaluated in detail here. Findings remain intriguing nevertheless: as a means of quality control, we report that traditional dialectological methods have revealed trends similar to those found by the app. This underlines the validity of the crowdsourcing method. We are presently extending DÄ architecture to other languages.

“But look: we have sat here too long”: Hilary Mantel’s tightrope walk of present-tense usage

Even after Hilary Mantel has won the Man Booker prize two times in a row with Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, her novelistic account of the life of Thomas Cromwell, her intriguing decision to write these historical novels in the present tense gave cause to surprisingly little extended comment beyond a perfunctory nod to its evocation of immediacy. This presents not only a lacunae in the discussion about Mantel’s novels, but is also symptomatic for a change in the contemporary critical evaluation of present-tense narration in general. If present-tense narration once used to be a marker for experimental daring and might even have implied a certain hostility towards fictionality, Mantel’s novels give ample evidence that literary sensibilities have changed. In order to understand the scope and nature of this change, my paper puts Mantel’s use of the present tense in the context of both the historical development of present-tense usage and the ample contemporary landscape of present-tense narration. This allows me to show that the complexities of present-tense usage belie a reduction of its effect to an evocation of immediacy. Rather, I argue, Mantel uses it for a delicate tightrope walk between proximity and distance, history and fiction, authenticity and imagination.

Of missing fathers and Big Fish: reconstructive tendencies after postmodernism

Many things have been said about literature after postmodernism, but one point there seems to be some agreement on is that it does not turn its back radically on its postmodernist forerunner, but rather generally continues to heed and value their insights. There seems to be something strikingly non-oedipal about the recent aesthetic shift. It is a project of reconstruction that remains deeply rooted in postmodernist tenets. Such an essentially non-oedipal attitude, I would argue, is central to the nature of the reconstructive shift. This, however, also raises questions about the wider cultural context from which such an aesthetic stance arises. If postmodernism was nurtured by the revolutionary spirits of the late 1960s, reconstruction faces a different world with different strategies. Instead of the postmodernist urge to subvert, expose and undermine, reconstruction yearns towards tentative and fragile intersubjective understanding, towards responsibility and community. Instead of revolt and rebellion it explores reconciliation and compromise. One instance in which this becomes visible in reconstructive narratives is the recurring figure of the lost father. Missing father figures abound in recent novels by authors like Mark Z. Danielewski, Dave Eggers, Yann Mantel, David Mitchell etc. It almost seems like a younger generation is yearning for the fathers which postmodernism has struggled hard to do away with. My paper will focus on one particularly striking example to explore the implications of this development: Daniel Wallace’s novel Big Fish and Tim Burton’s well-known film adaptation of the same. In their negotiation of fact and fiction, of doubt and belief, of freedom and responsibility, all of which converge in a father-son relationship, they serve well to illustrate central characteristics and concerns of recent attempts to leave postmodernism behind.