Cultural entrenchment of folktales is encoded in language

Folgert Karsdorp,Lauren Fonteyn

doi:10.1057/s41599-019-0234-9

Abstract

In this interdisciplinary study, we explore the understudied effects of growing cultural entrenchment on the form of stories with a long reproduction history. Drawing on insight from literary theory, theoretical linguistics, and cultural evolution theory, we argue that changes in the cultural entrenchment of fairy tales and folk stories are reflected in (small) structural ‘mutations’ in the story. More specifically, we aim to show that with the increasing familiarity of “Little Red Riding Hood”, its story frame and characters have gradually become part of the author and audience’s shared world knowledge, which is encoded in the type of linguistic devices used to introduce the characters. To this end, we performed a Bayesian logistic regression analysis on a diachronic collection (late 18th century–2015) of the world’s most iconic fairy tale, using automatically generated time estimations for a subset of undated reproductions in the story lineage, and including these estimates and approximated measurement errors in the statistical model. Results show that there is indeed a marked increase of linguistic markers that indicate that the characters are already known or “accessible” to the audience. This development reflects the author’s changing intuitions and beliefs about the familiarity of the story, and, indirectly, the changing expectations of the story’s audience regarding the appearance of certain characters in the story frame. Notably, this study is the first to quantitatively describe the diachronic development of a story (and the concepts associated with it) into the realm of ‘shared knowledge’, showing that it is a slow and gradual process. The results help refine our understanding of cultural evolution as well as the workings of speaker-addressee dynamics. Conceptualising the observed linguistic mutations as an instance of guided variation, we argue that the increase of definite first mentions as a function of cultural entrenchment can be treated as an example of variation guided by pragmatic principles such as Grice’s Maxim of Quantity, making character introductions as informative as (and not more informative than) required.

Highlights

Through their countless reproductions and retellings, fairy tales such as “Snow White”, “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Cinderella” have become widely known by Western audiences, and as a result have gradually become deeply and undeniably entrenched in Western culture
If our hypothesis holds, we may expect that the odds of introducing the characters by means of definite reference increases as a function of time
We suggested that (i) the presence of pictures of the wolf or Red Riding Hood has a positive effect on the probability of definite first mentions, and (ii) that in the case of Red Riding Hood, the effect of time is mitigated by the cooccurrence of her introduction and traditional fairy tale opening phrases

Summary

Introduction

Through their countless reproductions and retellings, fairy tales such as “Snow White”, “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Cinderella” have become widely known by Western audiences, and as a result have gradually become deeply and undeniably entrenched in Western culture. In this interdisciplinary study, we aim to explore the understudied effects of growing cultural entrenchment (defined here as ‘the actual as well as the assumed/expected knowledge shared between individuals in a cultural community’) on the form of stories with a long reproduction history. “Little Red Riding Hood”, with its longstanding reproduction record (and perhaps even longer oral history, cf. Tehrani et al, 2016), is an ideal object for studying whether and how changes in the cultural entrenchment of stories are expressed through and encoded in language

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion