An interlingual study of the lexico-semantic field LAUGH in Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
-
and
Abstract
This paper presents a series of theoretical and methodological choices against previous research and innovations for practical structuralist lexical field studies. Starting from a critical literature review of relevant work, it develops a synchronic interlingual study of the lexico-semantic field around words for laugh, smile, grin, etc. in an aligned corpus of eight translations of Kesey’s novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the English original text. Studies on paradigmatically-defined lexical fields of semantically competing words, such as the present one, have been criticized for not scaling beyond the actual field investigated. But with explicit methodological decisions and for specific domains for which aligned multilingual corpora exist they are shown to yield valuable insights. This paper reports the progress in lexical field theory, while also reviving semantic features and applying visual analytics, by way of analyzing examples from an aligned literary corpus.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the following people for collecting and annotating the lexical material in different translations of Ken Kesey’s novel, not all of which could be considered for the present paper, over the last nine years: Adel Aldawsari (Arabic), Władislaw Chlopicki (Polish), Hilal Ergül (Turkish), Meichan Huang (Chinese), Liisi Laineste (Estonian), Shigehito Menjo (Japanese). The other languages were analyzed by the authors themselves. We would also like to thank those who double-checked the analyses of the individual languages, did earlier versions of the alignments, or provided technological support: Oğuz Akgüngör (Turkish), Hessah Aldayel (Arabic), Ursula Beermann (German), Alberto Miras Fernández (Spanish), Todd Morris, Brett Pierce (English), Andrea Samson (French), Ünal Zakoğlu (Turkish), and Ying Zhang (Chinese). Finally, we’d like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
References
Bendix, Edward Herman. 1966. Componential analysis of general vocabulary: The semantic structure of a set of verbs in English, Hindi, and Japanese. The Hague: Mouton.Search in Google Scholar
Berlin, Brent & Paul Kay. 1969. Basic color terms: Their universality and evolution. Oakland: University of California Press.Search in Google Scholar
Coşeriu, Eugenio. 1977. Principios de semántica estructural. Madrid: Gredos.Search in Google Scholar
De Saussure, Ferdinand. 1916. Cours de linguistique générale. Lausanne & Paris: Payot.Search in Google Scholar
Ekman, Paul & Wallace V. Friesen. 1982. Felt, false, and miserable smiles. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 6. 238–252.10.1007/BF00987191Search in Google Scholar
Ekman, Paul, Wallace Friesen & Joseph Hager. 2002. Facial action coding system: The manual on CD ROM. Salt Lake City: A Human Face.Search in Google Scholar
Geeraerts, Dirk. 2010. Theories of lexical semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198700302.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Gipper, Helmut. 1959. Sessel oder Stuhl? Ein Beitrag zur Bestimmung von Wortinhalten im Bereich der Sachkultur [Loveseat or chair? A contribution to the determination of word meanings in the field of objects.]. In Helmut Gipper (ed.), Sprache, Schlüssel zur Welt. Festschrift für Leo Weisgerber, 271–292. Düsseldorf: Schwann.Search in Google Scholar
Glenn, Phillip. 2003. Laughter in interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511519888Search in Google Scholar
Glenn, Phillip & Elizabeth Holt. 2013. Studies of laughter in interaction. London: Bloomsbury Academic.10.5040/9781472542069Search in Google Scholar
Greimas, Algirdas Julien. 1987. On meaning. Mineapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Search in Google Scholar
Greimas, Algirdas Julien & Joseph Courtés. 1979. Semiotics and language. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Hempelmann, Christian F. 2007. ‘Laughter” in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Einer flog über das Kuckucksnest. 2007 Annual Congress of the Swiss Society for Psychology (SGP-SSP), Zurich.Search in Google Scholar
Hjelmslev, Louis. 1969. Prolegomena to a theory of language. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Search in Google Scholar
Hoberg, Rudolf. 1970. Die Lehre vom sprachlichen Feld [The study of linguistic fields]. Düsseldorf: Schwann.Search in Google Scholar
Huber, Tania. 2011. Enkodierung und Dekodierung verschiedener Arten des Lachens: Eine FACS-basierte Studie mit Schauspielern [Encoding and decoding different types of laughter: A FACS-based study with actors.]. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation., Switzerland. University of Zurich.Search in Google Scholar
Katz, Jerrold, J. 1976. A hypothesis about the uniqueness of natural language. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 280. 33–41.10.1111/j.1749-6632.1976.tb25468.xSearch in Google Scholar
Kay, Paul, Brent Berlin, Luisa Maffi, William R. Merrifield & Richard Cook. 2009. The world color survey. Stanford: CSLI.Search in Google Scholar
Keim, Daniel A., Joern Kohlhammer, Geoffrey Ellis & Florian Mansmann. (eds.). 2010. Mastering the information age – solving problems with visual analytics. Goslar: Eurographics.Search in Google Scholar
Kesey, Ken. 1962. One flew over the cuckoo’s nest. New York: Signet.Search in Google Scholar
Kesey, Ken. 1969. Vol au-dessus s’un nid de coucou. French. Transl. by Michel Deutsch. Paris: Stock.Search in Google Scholar
Kesey, Ken. 1971. Einer flog über das Kuckucksnest. German. Transl. by Hans Hermann. Reinbek: Rowohlt.Search in Google Scholar
Kesey, Ken. 1976. Qualcuno volò sul nido del cuculo. Italian. Transl. by Bruno Oddera. Milan: Rizzoli.Search in Google Scholar
Kesey, Ken. 1981 Tiran Fouk A’sh Aloukwak. Arabic. Transl. by Subhi Hadidi. Ed. by Elias Khoury. Beirut: Arab Research Foundation.Search in Google Scholar
Kesey, Ken. 2000a. Kakkoo no su no uede. Japanese. Transl. by Iwao Iwamoto. Tokyo: Toyamabou.Search in Google Scholar
Kesey, Ken. 2000b. Guguk Kuṣu. Turkish. Transl. by Merih Erol. İstanbul: Arion.Search in Google Scholar
Kesey, Ken. 2002. Guguk Kuṣu. Turkish. Transl. by Aziz Üstel. İstanbul: Merkez Kitaplar.Search in Google Scholar
Kesey, Ken. 2003. Lot nad kukułczym gniazdem. Polish. Transl. by Tomasz Mirkowicz. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Albatros. A. Kuryłowicz.Search in Google Scholar
Kesey, Ken. 2006. Alguien voló sobre el nido del cuco. Spanish. Transl. by Mireia Bofill Abelló. Barcelona: Anagrama.Search in Google Scholar
Kesey, Ken. 2008. Fei yue feng ren yuan. Chinese. Transl. by Hu Hong. Chongqing: Chongqing Publishing House.Search in Google Scholar
Kesey, Ken. 2013. Vol au-dessus s’un nid de coucou. French. Transl. by Michel Deutsch. Revised by Virginie Bruhl. Paris: Stock.Search in Google Scholar
Kruger, Alet. 2004. Shakespeare in Afrikaans: A corpus-based study of involvement in different registers of drama translation. Language Matters: Studies in the Languages of Southern Africa: 35(1), Special Issue: Corpus-Based Translation Studies – Research and Applications. 275–29410.1080/10228190408566217Search in Google Scholar
Krzywinski, Martin I., Jacqueline E. Schein, Inanc Birol, Joseph Connors, Randy Gascoyne, Doug Horsman, Steven J. Jones & Marco A. Marra. 2009. Circos: An information aesthetic for comparative genomics. Genome Research 19(9). 1639–1645.10.1101/gr.092759.109Search in Google Scholar
Lehrer, Adrienne. 1969. Semantic cuisine. Journal of Linguistics 5(1). 39–55.10.1017/S0022226700002048Search in Google Scholar
Lipka, L. 1979. Semantic components of English nouns and verbs and their justification. Angol Filológiai Tanulmángok 12. 187–203.Search in Google Scholar
Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics. New York: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Maxwell, Richard D. 1970. The abdication of masculinity in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In Broughton, Bradford C. (ed.), Twenty-Seven to One, 203–211. Potsdam, NY: Ryan.Search in Google Scholar
Mills, Nicolaus. 1972. Ken Kesey and the politics of laughter. Centennial Review 16. 82–90.Search in Google Scholar
Nerlich, Brigitte & David D. Clarke. 2000. Semantic fields and frames: Historical explorations of the interface between language, action, and cognition. Journal of Pragmatics 32. 125–150.10.1016/S0378-2166(99)00042-9Search in Google Scholar
Nirenburg, Sergei & Victor Raskin. 2004. Ontological semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar
Ogarkova, Anna, Cristina Soriano & Caroline Lehr. 2012. Naming feeling: exploring the equivalence of emotion terms in five European languages. Dynamicity in Emotion Concepts 27. 253–284.Search in Google Scholar
Porzig, Walter. 1934. Wesenhafte Bedeutungsbeziehungen [essential semantic relations]. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache und Literatur 58. 70–97.10.1515/bgsl.1934.1934.58.70Search in Google Scholar
Quené, Hugo, Gün R. Semin & Francesco Foroni. 2012. Audible smiles and frowns affect speech comprehension. Speech Communication 54. 917–922.10.1016/j.specom.2012.03.004Search in Google Scholar
Santana López, Belen. 2006. Wie wird das Komische übersetzt [How is humor translated]? Berlin: Frank & Timme.Search in Google Scholar
Steinberger, Ralf, Bruno Pouliquen, Anna Widiger, Camelia Ignat, Tomaž Erjavec & Dan Tufiş. 2006. The JRC-Acquis: A multilingual aligned parallel corpus with 20+ languages. In: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’2006). 2142–2147.Search in Google Scholar
Tanner, Stephen L. 1973. Salvation through laughter: Ken Kesey and the Cuckoo’s Nest. Southwest Review 58(2). 125–137.Search in Google Scholar
Thomas, James J. & Kristin A. Cook. (eds.). 2005. Illuminating the path: The research and development agenda for visual analytics. National Visualization and Analytics Center. http://vis.pnnl.gov/pdf/RD_Agenda_VisualAnalytics.pdfSearch in Google Scholar
Trier, Jost. 1931. Der deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes [German vocabulary in the semantic field of the mind]. Heidelberg: Winter.Search in Google Scholar
Wandruszka, Mario. 1969. Sprachen: vergleichbar und unvergleichlich [Languages: comparable and incomparable]. Munich: Piper.Search in Google Scholar
Wandruszka, Mario. 1979. “Falsche Freunde”: Ein linguistisches Problem und seine Lösung [‘False friends’: a linguistic problem and its solution]. Lebende Sprachen 24(1). 4–9.10.1515/les.1979.24.1.4Search in Google Scholar
Wandruszka, Mario. 1984. Das Leben der Sprachen: vom menschlichen Sprechen und Gespräch] [The life of languages: on human speaking and dialogue]. Stuttgart: DVA.Search in Google Scholar
Weisgerber, Johann Leo. 1951. Das Gesetz der Sprache als Grundlage des Sprachstudiums [The law of language as the foundation of linguistics]. Heidelberg: Quelle und Meyer.Search in Google Scholar
Appendix A: Selected alignments (including translations)
| Instance | Page translation | Inflected translation | Glossing | Base-form translation | Lemma translation | Context translation | Page English | Inflected word(s) English | Lemma English | Contect English | |
| Spanish | 364 | 263 | reír | re-ír laugh-V-INF ‘giggling’ | reír | re- | …empezaron a reír otra vez… | 253 | giggling | giggle | …and got to giggling again as they discussed… |
| French | 146 | 148 | sourire | souri-re smile-SG.M ‘smile’ | sourire | souri- | …sourire de poupèe… | 89 | smile | smile | Her doll smile is gone. |
| Italian | 98 | 88 | risata | ris-at-a laugh-DER.NMLZ.SG.F ‘laugh’ | risata | risat- | …quella risata tesa, squittente… | 63 | laugh | laugh | … that strained squeaking laugh… |
| Turkish | 143 | 92 | sırıtarak | sırıt-arak grin.V-PRS.ADV “grinning” | sırıtmak | sırıt- | McMurphy sırıtarak … | 87 | grinning | grin | …he’s grinning down on her… |
| Japanese | 87 | 95 | warau 笑う | wara-u laugh-NONPST.V “sneers” | warau | wara-u | ..sesera warau… | 58 | sneers | sneer | … gestures, grins, grimaces, sneers. |
| German | 225 | 223 | lacht | lach-t laugh-V-PRS.3SG ‘he laughs’ | lachen | lach- | Er lacht und betupft seinen Kopf… | 180 | laughs | laugh | He laughs and dabs at his head… |
| Arabic | 28 | 35 | yadhak يضحك | ya-dhak 3M-laugh “he laughs” | yadhak | d-h-k | / | 25 | laughs | laugh | He laughs again… |
| Chinese | 382 | 308 | hehexiaozhe 呵呵笑 | hehe-xiao-zhe onomat.-laugh-NOM “grins” | hehexiao | hehexiao | yingzhe tade yanguang hehexiaozhe… | 262 | grins | grin | …their grins mocked the old confident smile she had lost |
Appendix B: Sample rows with explanation
| Row name | Example (from Italian) | Explanation |
| 1. instance | 280 | index number referring to the English original list of tokens in row 9 (1–396) |
| 2. page translation | 291 | page number where the target language token appears. |
| 3. inflected translation | ridendo | the token that translates the English token (row 9) into the target language, including inflectional and derivational morphemes. |
| 4. glossing | rid-endo | gloss of the translated token as it appears in the text; the first row reproduces the inflected token in the target language and separates its morphological components with a dash; the second row includes the lemma in English, followed by a dash and the list of the morphological features of the target language token; the third row includes an idiomatic translation of the target language token into English |
| laugh-V-GER‘laughing’ | ||
| 5. base-form | ridere | the translated token reduced to its base form (for example, the masculine singular for an adjective in Spanish, or the infinitive form for a verb in Italian). |
| 6. lemma translation | rid- | the translated token deprived of any inflectional or derivational morphemes, reduced to its basic lemma. |
| 7. context translation | …come se stessero ridendo di noi… | immediate context, usually the phrase or clause where the translated token occurs |
| 8. page English | 205 | page number of the English token |
| 9. inflected word(s) English | laughing | inflected word in English as it appears in the original text |
| 10. lemma English | laugh | English lemma (the marked “trigger” words), deprived of any morphological element and reduced to its basic type (see row 6). |
| 11. context English | …the boats… made a sound like they were laughing at us. | immediate context where the English original token occurs (see row 7). |
©2015 by De Gruyter Mouton
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- ‘Man the hunter’: a critical reading of hunt-based conceptual metaphors of love and sexual desire
- Emily Dickinson’s “My life had stood a loaded gun” – An interdisciplinary analysis
- An interlingual study of the lexico-semantic field LAUGH in Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
- Review
- Unnatural narratology: core issues and critical debates
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- ‘Man the hunter’: a critical reading of hunt-based conceptual metaphors of love and sexual desire
- Emily Dickinson’s “My life had stood a loaded gun” – An interdisciplinary analysis
- An interlingual study of the lexico-semantic field LAUGH in Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
- Review
- Unnatural narratology: core issues and critical debates
