Poe & Conan Doyle & Native Language Identification
Last year, I wrote the literature review part of my thesis. In it, I mentioned stories about Sherlock Holmes and Detective Dupin, between intensive research papers on the topic of Native Language Identification (NLID). My advisor suggested I remove the half-page paragraph in favor of real, pertinent research. Her point was absolutely valid. Writing a literature review is a matter of reading published research relating to a thesis topic and writing a paper about those papers and how they support or otherwise affect one's thesis. Including two literary detectives was pure self-indulgence (and it would mean I could cite Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in my bibliography).
The two stories I mentioned are Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue and Conan Doyle's A Scandal in Bohemia. They both include the identification of native language, however briefly, as one of their respective clues. I have always found these fictional examples fascinating, and I think this blog would be a better place to share them. Perhaps they will better exemplify NLID for the non-linguist.
In A Scandal in Bohemia, Sherlock Holmes had some very British things to say about the grammar of an anonymous note: "And the man who wrote the note is a German. Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence – 'This account of you we have from all quarters received.' A Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs." By "uncourteous to his verbs" Holmes means the distance between the sentence subject and the verb. Most native English speakers might read the sentence "This account of you we have from all quarters received." as being technically grammatical - you can understand its meaning - but your speaker's intuition might flag it as being odd. It is that speaker's intuition that Holmes pairs with his knowledge of German grammar to deduce the author's native language. That is exactly the intuitive process I wish to quantify with my own research.
Five decades earlier, Edgar Allan Poe was writing some of the world's first detective novels. In one of them, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Poe grossly overestimates the physical and linguistic prowess of an orangutan - he was a poet, not a scientist. In this story, the connection to Native Language Identification is a little more opaque, but I feel that it still exemplifies the value of speaker intuition. One of the clues in the case is the fact that none of the four witnesses can agree on the language spoken by an unseen voice at the scene, nor can they repeat any of the words they heard it speak. Poe's Detective Dupin considers the witnesses' speaker intuitions to assume the voice's native language as being no language at all. The killer was an orangutan, as the story goes. It's a bit of a stretch to call this Native Language Identification, I admit. Still, I won't get to put this into my thesis, so you get to read it instead.
One thing these fictional detectives have in common is their use of different kinds of evidence. While I will write about linguistics and language evidence, let me not convince you that a criminal case can be solved with language alone. Even DNA evidence on its own is not enough to confidently solve a case. It is through careful consideration of all available facts that truth may become evident.
The two stories I mentioned are Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue and Conan Doyle's A Scandal in Bohemia. They both include the identification of native language, however briefly, as one of their respective clues. I have always found these fictional examples fascinating, and I think this blog would be a better place to share them. Perhaps they will better exemplify NLID for the non-linguist.
In A Scandal in Bohemia, Sherlock Holmes had some very British things to say about the grammar of an anonymous note: "And the man who wrote the note is a German. Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence – 'This account of you we have from all quarters received.' A Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs." By "uncourteous to his verbs" Holmes means the distance between the sentence subject and the verb. Most native English speakers might read the sentence "This account of you we have from all quarters received." as being technically grammatical - you can understand its meaning - but your speaker's intuition might flag it as being odd. It is that speaker's intuition that Holmes pairs with his knowledge of German grammar to deduce the author's native language. That is exactly the intuitive process I wish to quantify with my own research.
Five decades earlier, Edgar Allan Poe was writing some of the world's first detective novels. In one of them, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Poe grossly overestimates the physical and linguistic prowess of an orangutan - he was a poet, not a scientist. In this story, the connection to Native Language Identification is a little more opaque, but I feel that it still exemplifies the value of speaker intuition. One of the clues in the case is the fact that none of the four witnesses can agree on the language spoken by an unseen voice at the scene, nor can they repeat any of the words they heard it speak. Poe's Detective Dupin considers the witnesses' speaker intuitions to assume the voice's native language as being no language at all. The killer was an orangutan, as the story goes. It's a bit of a stretch to call this Native Language Identification, I admit. Still, I won't get to put this into my thesis, so you get to read it instead.
One thing these fictional detectives have in common is their use of different kinds of evidence. While I will write about linguistics and language evidence, let me not convince you that a criminal case can be solved with language alone. Even DNA evidence on its own is not enough to confidently solve a case. It is through careful consideration of all available facts that truth may become evident.
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