Passage IV

NATURAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article “The Shakespeared Brain” by Philip Davis (©2006 by The Reader).

The word semantic refers to the meaning a word or sentence conveys. The word syntax refers to the grammatical structure of a sentence.

The linguistic phenomenon in Shakespeare which is known as ‘functional shift’ refers to the way that Shakespeare will often use one part of speech—a noun or an adjective, say—to serve as another, often a verb, shifting its grammatical nature with minimal alteration to its shape. Thus in Lear for example, Edgar comparing himself to the king: ‘He chided as fathered’ (nouns ‘child’ and ‘father’ shifted to verbs); in Troilus and Cressida, 'Kingdomed Achilles in commotion rages’ (noun ‘kingdom’ converted to adjective).

Research suggests that there is one, specific part of the brain that processes nouns and another part that processes verbs: but what happens when for a micro-second there is a serious hesitation between whether, in context, this is noun or verb?

With the help of my colleague in English language, Victorina, González-Díaz, as well as scientists, I designed a set of stimuli—40 examples of Shakespeare’s functional shift. At this very early and rather primitive stage, we could not give our student-subjects undiluted lines of Shakespeare because too much in the brain would light up in too many places: that is one of the definitions of what Shakespeare-language does. So, the stimuli we created were simply to do with the noun-to-verb or verb-to-noun shift-words themselves, with more ordinary language around them.

Around each of those sentences of functional shift we also provided three counterexamples which were shown on screen to the experiment’s subjects in random order: all they had to do was press a button saying whether the sentence roughly made sense or not. Thus, below, A (‘accompany’) is a sentence which is conventionally grammatical, makes simple sense, and acts as a control; B (‘charcoal’) is grammatically odd, like a functional shift, but it makes no semantic sense in context; C (‘incubate’) is grammatically correct but still semantically does not make sense; D (‘companion’) is a Shakespearian functional shift from noun to verb, and is grammatically odd but does make sense:

A) I was not supposed to go there alone: you said you would accompany me.

B) I was not supposed to go there alone: you said you would charcoal me.

C) I was not supposed to go there alone: you said you would incubate me.

D) I was not supposed to go there alone: you said you would companion me.

So far we have just carried out the EEG stage of experimentation. EEG works as follows in its graph like measurements. When the brain senses a semantic violation, it automatically registers what is called an N400 effect, a negative wave modulation 400 milliseconds after the onset of the critical word that disrupts the meaning of a sentence. The N400 amplitude is small when little semantic integration effort is needed (e.g., to integrate the word ‘eat’ in the sentence ‘The pizza was too hot to eat’), and large when the critical word is unexpected and therefore difficult to integrate (e.g., The pizza was too hot to sing’).

But when the brain senses a syntactic violation, there is a P600 effect, a parietal modulation peaking approximately 600 milliseconds after the onset of the word that upsets syntactic integrity. Thus, when a word violates the grammatical structure of a sentence (e.g., ‘The pizza was too hot to mouth’), a positive wave is systematically observed.

Preliminary results suggest this:

(A) With the simple control sentence (‘you said you would accompany me’), NO N400 or P600 effect because it is correct both semantically and syntactically.

(B) With ‘you said you would charcoal me’, BOTH N400 and P600 high because it violates both grammar and meaning.

(C) With ‘you said you would incubate me’, NO P600 (it makes grammatical sense) but HIGH N400 (it makes no semantic sense).

(D) With the Shakespearian ‘you said you would companion me’, HIGH P600 (because it feels like a grammatical anomaly) but NO N400 (the brain will tolerate it, almost straightaway, as making sense despite the grammatical difficulty). This is in marked contrast with B above.

So what? First, it meant that ‘functional shift’ was a robust phenomenon: that is to say, it had a distinct and unique effect on the brain. Instinctively Shakespeare was right to use it as one of his dramatic tools. Second, the P600 effect continued after the word (‘companion’）that triggered it. The brain was thus primed to look out for more difficulty, to work at a higher level, whilst still accepting that fundamental sense was being made.

Shakespeare is stretching us; he is opening up the possibility of further peaks, new potential pathways or developments.