The Function of Function Words in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying

Abstract

The Function of Function Words in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying W illiam Faulkners novel As I Lay Dying (1930) tells the story of a poor Mississippi farm family undergoing the trauma of a moth­ er’s death. Composed of a series of 59 monologues, the novel provides the reader access to each character’s thoughts and to the language that each uses to construct his or her representation ofthe even that unfold. This essay follows the work ofJames Pennebaker and others in ex­ ploring the extent to which the characters’ use ofpronouns and other “function words” in their narratives can tell us about their psychological situation, their relationships with others, and about the novel more generally. Function words emerge as a powerful analytical tool for detecting patterns in and providing in­ sight into this complex novel, as well as its importance to Faulkner as he began to build a reputation as a credible southern literary voice. LIWC and the Trauma of Addie Bundren Pennebaker developed software in the mid-1990s, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), which analyzes text for pronouns and other non-con­ tent words such as articles and prepositions—the “stealth words” that provide grammatical structure for language. Relatively few ofthese kinds ofwords exist in English (about 450), but they comprise over half (55%) of the words we use in spoken or written communication. The 20 most frequently used words in English are function words, and those 20 alone “represent almost thirty per­ cent of all words that people use, read, and hear” (Pennebaker 25). Two things stand out in particular about function words. Firstly, they are the core reason that all interpersonal communication is inherently social. In order for one to understand to whom “I” or “you” refers in a conversation, one has to be part of the conversation, or an informed listener to it. Separate function and content words from a paragraph, and a reader will have a good sense of what is going on from the content words and no idea whatsoever from the excised list ofpro­ nouns, articles, and prepositions. Secondly, even though they are “invisible,” function words can say a lot about a person’s “personality, social connections, and psychological states” (Pennebaker 18). Pennebaker, a psychologist, became interested in function word analysis after spending many years working with 3 4 Charles Hannon Function Words in As I Lay Dying victims of trauma and, in particular, after seeing the healing power that writ­ ing about their trauma had for these victims. He wondered if there were any correlation between the way people write about their traumatic experiences and their ability to recover from them. He found reliable patterns in the writ­ ing of people who have experienced trauma and emerged from the trauma in psychologically healthy ways. One such pattern reaveals that, when writing about traumatic experiences, “healthy people say something about their own thoughts and feelings in one instance and then explore what is happening with other people before writing about themselves again” (13). Pennebaker relates this “perspective shifting” to modern therapy sessions in which a psychologist might ask a patient to talk about how a traumatic event affected him- or her­ self, as well as others. Thus one of Pennebakers foci, as a psychologist and in the software he developed, became the way writers and speakers use pronouns and other function words: a healthy response to trauma was reflected in the pronomial patterns oftrauma-sufferers’ narratives. Addie Bundrens single monologue stands out from others in As I Lay Dy­ ing for many reasons, but missing from most analyses is a specific acknowl­ edgement of the traumatic subtext ofher narrative, her effort to work through the devastating facts ofher life that have brought her to this moment. Given the conceit of the novel, we do not know whether Addies voice comes to us from her deathbed or, posthumously, from her coffin. Either way, a reader senses that this monologue is Addies one chance to make sense, using the words she distrusts so much, to come to peace with her fate. Figure 1 presents a stark pic­ ture of how she accomplishes this: her noun and pronoun references map out...