An Excursion on Land

Mats Mobärg

doi:10.35360/njes.623

Abstract

A fundamental aspect of political language is the words we use for potentially contentious political-cultural concepts, as well as how we use them. This paper investigates the use of the noun land in a small sample of English authors, from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf, comparing that use to how the same authors use the nouns country and nation, as presented in a previous paper along the same lines. In addition to simple frequencies, the combinatory potential of the noun land is examined. Special attention is paid to the use of land in the works of Shakespeare and Marie Corelli. Land in Shakespeare was shown to have a higher combinatory potential than country, which was ascribed partly to the formal properties of the word, partly to its suitability as part of Shakespeare’s imagery, in the context of the political situation in England in the late sixteenth century. Corelli’s abundant use of land is seen as exaggeratedly symptomatic of Victorian style, which has contributed to the word being stylistically marked in present-day English. A general finding is that land, even when used in a political sense, retains some of its concrete meaning, which may contribute to its rhetorical usefulness.

Highlights

A fundamental aspect of political language is the words we use for potentially contentious political-cultural concepts, as well as how we use them
The Brontë sample is somewhat smaller than the Corelli one, but in terms of the proportion of ‘political’ land, it is very similar (48%) to Corelli
Even though it is difficult to draw a rigid line between the verb phrases allowing some degree of physical interpretation of land and the ones that more likely are based on a metaphorical use of land, meaning ‘land as its people,’ it seems that Shakespeare’s selection of companions, apart from being larger, exhibits a stronger metaphorical potential than those of the Brontës and Corelli

Summary

Preamble

This land is your land, this land is my land From California to the New York island From the Redwood Forest, to the Gulf Stream waters This land was made for you and me. If Maȟpíya Lúta spoke in Lakota language rather than English when he said this—which is likely—it is difficult to know his exact wording, but for the sake of argument, let us say that both this and the Guthrie quotation use the noun land in a way that suggests a common human physical environment of some considerable size and importance, to which people claim some kind of inherent right It is, in particular, this use of the word land that I am trying to explore in this paper, while at the same time further trying out a method of clarifying the meaning of contentious political-cultural words (cf Mobärg 2016). Procedure The very first step in the procedure, before the actual classification is made, is to identify all target words in the sample that have the kind of companions necessary for the analysis proposed This means discarding from the analysis those instances of land (‘political’) whose companions are too weak to serve the present purpose, such as:. These classifications, too, are less than absolutely clear-cut, but since I am making no strong statistical claims, but rather looking for tendencies, as well as further trying out the method I devised in my previous paper, this should not be a major problem

Results: land with companions

Findings

Discussion