Editor’s note: This article was initially published in The Daily Gazette, Swarthmore’s online, daily newspaper founded in Fall 1996. As of Fall 2018, the DG has merged with The Phoenix. See the about page to read more about the DG.
Professor of Linguistics Donna Jo Napoli introduced visiting Professor Jack Hoeksema as “a linguist’s linguist,” a fitting epithet for the man who proceeded to give “Not for Lack of Words: Lexical Domains that Keep on Growing.” Hoeksema is the Cornell Visiting Professor from the University of Groningen in The Netherlands, and his lecture incorporated both Dutch and English examples throughout.
Hoeksema began by discussing the idea of progress within the history of language. While the development of language has certainly progressed since the days of cavemen, how are languages developing today? Grammar can only see cyclical change, with “no general drift towards either simplicity or complexity,” but languages are not only their grammars, but their lexicons. Hoeksema sees enormous growth in both Dutch and English lexicons, a growth that is not characteristic of languages that are primarily oral. To the question “But wouldn’t our brains create an upward limit for vocabulary growth?” Hoeksema responded that the entire lexicon of a language is never contained within one person, but rather within a larger speech community. “If the vocabulary of English is growing,” he speculated, “that could be the result of increasing specialization.”
Hoeksema went on to discuss some of the reasons that it is difficult to trace the growth of the entire lexicon. For example, we have more written material available from the 1990s than from the 1940s, so if we could compare all of the written material from each, we would almost necessarily see more words in the 1990s. While Hoeksema dreams of a day when the Internet will trace the usage patterns of every word in the world, and linguists will be able to play “reverse frequency Scrabble,” where points will be based not on the infrequency of the letters but rather on the infrequency of the words, that day is not here yet.
While Hoeksema’s claim that lexicons have been growing cannot yet be tested, it does stem from a series of smaller investigations. Hoeksema went on to tell the audience about three of those investigations, based around negative polarity items, the “swarming construction,” and adverbs of degree.
Common negative polarity items in English include “iota,” “drop,” and “dime.” When you say “I’m never giving a dime to the Red Cross again,” the word “dime” is playing a negative role, and could be replaced with “nothing” without suffering a change in meaning. If you said “I found a dime,” replacing “dime” with “something” would change the meaning of the sentence. As Hoeksema wryly put it, “you might have found a dollar, or a cigarette butt.”
In Dutch, the number of these kinds of words has been steadily climbing, and it now stands at 189. Everyone has heard that the Eskimos have dozens of words for snow, said Hoeksema, but “the fact that the Dutch have 189 words for nothing at all seems to have gone largely unnoticed.”
Hoeksema also discussed the “swarming construction.” In English, the “swarming construction” can be seen in sentences like “This place is swarming with rabbits” and “Iraq is crawling with insurgents.” English has several hundred words that can be used in the same way as “swarming” in this construction; in Dutch, the number of such words grew from 10 in 1900 to 46 today.
A third area that shows rapid expansion is adverbs of degree, from positive ones such as “vastly” and “infinitely” to neutral ones such as “rather,” “fairly,” and “middling” to negative ones such as “slightly,” “a bit,” and “a touch.” In the Middle Ages, “full” and “right” were the two most commonly used such adverbs. You used to be able to say things like “People danced full often,” but now “full” can only be applied to acts of cognition. “When a word becomes obsolete,” said Hoeksema, “it may become specialized.”
Hoeksema gave recent examples such as “hella” and “über” and then said, “I don’t want to give the impression that new words only arise in the hip slang of teenagers–a tad has arisen in the twentieth century, as have mind-numbingly and mind-bogglingly.” The growth in the set of English degree modifiers is staggering, going from 15 in the 1500s to around 240 today. Hoeksema has identified 340 such modifiers in Dutch, many of which have social or semantic specializations. In Dutch, “knap” can only be used to modify negative adjectives; in English, “highly” is more common with polysyllabic words and “very” is more common for monosyllabic words. All of this poses a “chicken-and-egg question”: does specialization cause new terms, or do new terms cause specialization? One thing can be sure, and that is that “vocabulary growth and specialization are going hand in hand.”
Why have we seen this ballooning growth in lexical domains? Hoeksema proposed that the increase in written language and in literacy is one of the most important reasons; because we have more time to think of specialized words when we are writing than when we are speaking, written languages can have more words than oral languages. He proposed that as far as grammar goes, “we may have reached the end of history in linguistics,” but he thinks that lexicons will continue to change.
“Let me end this lecture by making a modest plea for the study of the written language,” he concluded, “and then we can see whether the trends that I have sketched will continue, or whether they will flatten out?”
