=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2481/paper34
|storemode=property
|title=CULTURE as a ‘Liquid’ Modern Word. Evidence from Synchronic and Diachronic Language Resources
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2481/paper34.pdf
|volume=Vol-2481
|authors=Maristella Gatto
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/clic-it/Gatto19
}}
==CULTURE as a ‘Liquid’ Modern Word. Evidence from Synchronic and Diachronic Language Resources==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2481/paper34.pdf
CULTURE as a ‘Liquid’ Modern Word.
Evidence from Synchronic and Diachronic Language Resources
Maristella Gatto
Dipartimento di Lettere Lingue Arti.
Italianistica e Culture Comparate
maristella.gatto@uniba.it
change”, to “a conservative force”, to an increas-
Abstract 1 ingly flexible and liquid concept “fashioned to fit
individual freedom” (Bauman 2011: 1-17). It is
The aim of this paper is to discuss the results of a against this background that this paper attempts
corpus-based investigation of the process that has an investigation of the multifaceted process that
transformed the very specific material meaning over the centuries has transformed the very spe-
of the word “culture” into the extremely elusive, cific material meaning of the word “culture” into
liquid (Bauman 2011) concept we are familiar the extremely elusive concept we are familiar
with today. The analysis starts from the lexico- with today. The basic assumption is that the pro-
grammar profile of the world “culture” in con- cess of semantic change which transformed a
temporary syncronic corpus resources (Gatto word originally referring to the concepts of till-
2011; 2014) and attempts further exploration of age and husbandry (from the Latin colere) into a
these findings on the basis of diachronic lan- potentially polysemic word accommodating a far
guage resources. In particular, data from Google wider range of meanings is mirrored in changes
Books, accessed both via Ngram Viewer and in usage of the word, and in turn reflects changes
through the tools available at BYU Corpora, in society. In the wake of a growing interest for
have been used to test hypotheses for the behav- the use of language resources for the investiga-
iour of the world “culture” in the 19th and early tion of cultural and social phenomena (e.g.
20th century, whereas data from EEBO (Early Michel et al 2010) these changes can be observed
English Books Online) have been used to explore through the quantitative and qualitative analysis
patterns of usage in the period of time from 15th of the lexicogrammar patterns the word “culture”
to 18th century. has entered during its long history of existence.
The partial results of this research suggest that The very choice for the word “culture” originates
there is room for far reaching investigations into in Raymond Williams’ famous statement that
the (hi)story of this intriguing “complicated" culture is “one of the two or three most compli-
word, as Williams (1985: 87) dubbed it, and that cated words in the English language”. By identi-
computational methods and language resources fying “culture” as one of the key words of our
can well complement studies carried out in the times, Williams reminds us (1985: 87–93) that
context of the digital humanities, from the per- culture used to be, in its early uses, the noun of a
spective of historical linguistics, sociolinguistics process: the tending of something, basically
and cultural studies, when not providing the basis crops or animals. This meaning provided a basis
for fresh new insights and further explorations. for the important next stage of metaphorization,
when the tending of natural growth was extended
1 Introduction to a process of human development so that the
word “culture” came to be taken in absolute
Sketching the “historical peregrinations” of the
terms as signifying a process of refinement. Af-
concept of culture in his Culture in a Liquid
ter tracing the key moments in the development
Modern World, Bauman outlines the changing
of this word, Williams distinguishes three cate-
role of culture in society, from “an agent for
gories in modern usage:
(i) the noun which describes a process of
"Copyright © 2019 for this paper by its authors. Use intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic refinement;
permitted under Creative Commons License Attribu- e.g. a man of culture;
tion 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)."
(ii) the noun which describes the products of lemmas “cell” or “bacteria” in their co–text. This
intellectual and especially artistic activity; e.g. was done using the filter option and setting a
Ministry of Culture; broad co–text (15 words to the left and to the
(iii) the noun which indicates a particular right of the node). The results seem to indicate
way of life, whether of a people, a period, a that nearly 9,472 (2,46 per million) occurrences
group, or humanity in general; e.g. Jewish cul- of “culture” can be related to its scientific mean-
ture. ing in the BNC, 2,499 (1,61 per million) in
This paper takes Williams as a starting point to UkWaC, and 98,714 (3,47 per million) in En-
provide empirical evidence of the ways the word TenTen. While the method used was not to be
“culture” is used in the English language. Indeed considered totally reliable, on the basis of the
Williams himself, in his introduction to Culture relative negligibility of the results this aspect has
and Society, states that an enquiry into the devel- not been taken into account in the following
opment of this word should be carried out by commentary of the data (but this is certainly an
examining “not a series of abstracted problems, aspect which needs to be handeld with care when
but a series of statements by individuals” (1966: pursuing further research on this topic).
xvii), which bears striking similarities – though Given the limited scope of the paper only three
not intended - with the corpus-based approach lexico-grammar patterns will be focused on in
adopted in the present research. the subsections below.
2 Sketches of CULTURE. Evidence 2.1 Culture as object
from synchronic resources When considering the list of verbs having “cul-
The starting point of the investigation carried out ture” as their object, it seems that according to
in the paper are the preliminary results of inves- data computed by the Sketch Engine for all the
tigation into the lexicogrammar profile of the three corpora, the word “culture” has a consistent
word “culture” using Sketch Engine, a corpus tendency to occur as the object of such verbs as
query tool that provides a one-page summary of foster, promote, create, reflect, understand,
the lexico-grammar patterns of a word from a shape change. Respect does not appear only in
given corpus, as reported in Gatto (2011; 2014). the list for EnTenTen, as it is n.16, just out of the
In the first part of this paper data from three syn- first 15 positions chosen as a sample. While
chronic corpora of English (BNC UkWaC and these data are encouraging in showing that cor-
EnTenTen) will be compared. For a start, the pora built in different ways yield consistent re-
table below reports the number of occurrences sults for the collocates of “culture”, something
and the normalized frequency of the world interesting can be observed with reference to the
CULTURE in each corpus: changing position of some collocates. The collo-
cates foster, promote, create, and change seem to
BNC UKWAC ENTENTEN gain prominence in the two more recent web
10,281 200,663 3,692,159 corpora, but it is also interesting to consider how
90,1 129,70 200,80 experience, which did not appear in the top 15
per million per million per million list from the BNC, is one of the most significant
collocates for “culture” in the other two corpora.
By contrast, such patterns as assimilate, absorb
transmit, which indirectly refer to power rela-
It should be noted, that these occurrences obvi- tions, appear to be unique to the BNC.
ously include both those in which “culture” is Previous research has already discussed how
used with its general meaning in the humanities, concordance lines for such pattern as create+
which is the primary concern of the present anal- culture or foster + culture have a frequent co–
ysis, and those in which it is used as a scientific occurrence with words relating to the socio–
term (e.g. cell culture). Since the tools and re- economic domain, such as staff, enterprise, job,
sources used for the present research do not al- work; this, in turn, reveals that CULTURE, in
low for a disambiguation between the two mean- this context, has partially lost its original mean-
ings, an attempt has been made – heuristically – ing of a process/product of refinement, as in the
to estimate the number of occurrences of “cul- famous Arnoldian sense of “a pursuit of our total
ture” in its scientific sense, by computing the perfection, …the best which has been thought
number of occurrences of “culture” with the and said in the world” (Arnold, 1869, p. viii) and
rather concerns a set of ideas/behaviours relating the emergence of a new social and psychological
to a specific group in a specific context, like a condition, resulting from a change in society it-
workplace, company or organization – a new self. The very existence of a reverse culture
restricted meaning of “culture” (Gatto 2011; shock is related to novel ways of experiencing
2014). mobility and migration, which entail continuous
This view is also supported by the prominence of dislocations and relocations.
the pattern culture + within computed by the
Sketch Engine (542 occurrences, 4.2 per million) 2.3 A culture of *
as an interesting pattern especially in UkWaC, Finally a particularly significant pattern emerg-
which can well be interpreted in terms of the ing from the word sketch for “culture” is the
concept of “small culture” (Holliday 1999) pattern culture + of, which seems to turn the
As to the more recent collocation of CULTURE word “culture” into an extraordinarily capacious
with such verbs as experience and explore, we and inclusive category that can be used for any-
notice the emergence of the word cultures in the thing. And while some collocates might seem to
plural in their immediate co-text. These concord- confirm Stubbs’ intuition that the pattern has a
ance lines clearly reflect the anthropologi- relatively negative semantic prosody (1996, p.
cal/ethnographic meaning of culture inaugurated X), owing to collocations with words bearing
between late nineteenth and early twentieth cen- negative connotations, there is ample evidence
tury by Franz Boas and other scholars. This pat- that the pattern can equally accommodate posi-
tern has a quite consistent collocation with adjec- tive notions, like secrecy/openness,
tives like new, different, origin, other. It must be blame/impunity, entrepreneurship/dependency,
acknowledged, however, that – as far as UkWaC etc. as the list of collocates reported below sug-
in particular is concerned, these concordance gests:
lines often originate in specialized sites dealing
with the typically British experience of the gap
year, a datum which relates to the choices made
by the developers of ukWaC, who included aca-
demic sites (i.e. ac.uk sites) extensively in the
crawl. Nonetheless, these occurrences testify to a
radical shift in the meaning of culture, whereby
culture is something to be experienced, rather
than to be found in books (as Arnold would have
argued), again something quite distant from its
more traditional meaning.
2.2 Culture as modifier
Furthermore, the concordance lines for the pat-
As for the list of nouns modified by culture, this tern a culture of include many phrases in invert-
is opened, in the three corpora, by shock, a collo- ed commas, which seem to create a culture virtu-
cation which relates to a distinctively modern ally ex–nihilo, as Barker (2003, xix) would ar-
experience defined as culture shock, “the feel- gue, reducing culture to little more than an atti-
ings of isolation, rejection, etc., experienced tude, as in the examples reported below:
when one culture is brought into sudden contact
with another, as when a primitive tribe is con-
fronted by modern civilization” (Collins Cobuild
Dictionary). Significantly, one of the most prom-
inent collocates for culture shock in ukWaC is
reverse, which originates in the phrase reverse
culture shock, a form not yet attested in the
BNC, probably because the experience itself had
not yet been fully conceptualized. In this way the Here culture seems to have become a sort of neu-
recent web corpora ukWaC and EnTenTen do tral term that can keep the company of many dif-
not only provide evidence of a relatively new ferent words: a culture of corruption, and a cul-
linguistic formation, but in doing so they point to ture of accountability, a culture of violence, a
culture of peace, and even a culture of ‘buy now been there, or had it somehow emerged at a cer-
pay later’. As suggested by the various collocates tain point in time.
for the pattern a culture of shown above, this
lexico–grammar pattern really has the power of Indeed a search in Google Books using Ngram
turning culture into a sort of vox media, a liquid Viewer apparently suggests that the pattern
modern word that can be used for anything. emerged in the late 19th century, with most oc-
currences in the biological field, when it was re-
3 Evidence from diachronic resources ferred to the recent discovery of bacteria. Any-
way around the 1990s there was a dramatic surge
Starting from these preliminary observations on in usage for this pattern, possibly connected with
the lexico-grammar behaviour of the word “cul- the growing tendency to use culture as a vox me-
ture” in corpora representative of contemporary dia devoid of any specific meaning as in the ex-
usage, a new research question emerged. To amples reported in the previous section.
what extent can these patterns be considered as
characteristic of contemporary usage? And if
they are, how and when did they emerge? Is
there any other information that could be gath-
ered from the investigation of diachronic re-
sources?
3.1. Google Books
A first attempt at answering these questions was Similarly, the emergence of the phrase “culture
to query the Google Books database, through an shock”, which seems to be prominent in contem-
extremely limited and yet fascinating tool like porary corpora, can be located, with the help of
Ngram Viewer, a tool which allows to read line NGram Viewer, in a specific moment in history,
charts representing n-grams i.e. continuous se- in the late 50s:
quences from text, from the digitized books in
the Google Book collections, in terms of fre-
quency per year. The data can be accessed
through a free web-based interface that enables
relatively complex queries which support wild-
cards, POS-tagged search, case-sensitive queries,
etc. For this reason, this is a tool commonly used
in what has come to be known as “culturomics”,
a research trend which aims “to observe cultural
trends and subject them to quantitative investiga-
tion” on the basis of data obtained from Google Whereas “reverse culture shock” seems to have
books (Michel et al 2016). This approach is defi- appeared in the 1960s:
nitely controversial, especially from the perspec-
tive of corpus linguistics which is engaged in
more theoretically sound and qualitatively relia-
ble empirical research, and a very convincing
overview of its limitations is found in McEnery
and Baker (2016: 11-17). Nonetheless, in this
specific case, information retrieved form such
imperfect resources and limited tools could be
still be used as indications, as fingers pointed to
some interesting phenomena that might be worth Also interesting is the possibility to have a big
being investigated in more detail with more ap- picture in terms of changing behaviour of differ-
propriate resources. For instance, faced with the ent lexico-grammar patterns. This is the case of
prominence and significance of the pattern “a the diverging fortunes of the two patterns experi-
culture of” as typical of the lexico-grammar pro- ence + culture and understand + culture which
file of the word as described on the basis of data seem to provide evidence of the fact that culture
on contemporary usage, Ngram viewrs was used is more and more seen as something to be expe-
to try and see whether the pattern had always
rienced than to be learnt or, as the verb suggests, While limited in scoped, these data provide clear
cognitively appreciated and understood: evidence of the fact that the noun “culture” was
not a particularly frequent in Written Early Mod-
ern English, as the EEBO corpus has only 2283
occurrences for this word (2.31 per million). In-
deed, when CULTURE was used only in its orig-
inal ‘agricultural’ meaning it was probably some-
thing which was not to be written about. Anyway
data from EEBO makes us see firsthand the ori-
gins of its subsequent metaphorical meanings.
Especially in the dataset for the period 1600-
1699 the analysis of collocates for “culture”
shows the emerging coexistence of the literal
agricultural meaning and of a spiritual metaphor-
ical meaning. It is at this stage that cultivation
emerges as a meaningful collocate for “culture”,
Besides using Ngram Viewer, the present re-
often in the such sentences as “cultivation of the
search has also tried to profit from the interface
minde”. However we have to wait until 1700-
for Google Books made available through Mark
1799 for civilization to appear among the most
Davies well-known Corpora website to search
salient collocates for “culture”. Which brings us
the One Million Books and Fiction datasets.
back to the beginning of this story…
Based on the same Google Books data the inter-
face was created by Mark Davies, Professor of
Linguistics at Brigham Young University, and it 4 Conclusion
is related to other large corpora made available
through the same service. The system allows Using different resources to map such a complex
more refined queries than Google Books inter- research field, so as to obtain a general picture of
face, and supports the comparison of the data in significant patterns of usage in the evolution of
two different sections of the corpus. language is certainly fascinating, but this is not
The interface available at Corpora BYU confirms enough. And it goes without saying that it is nec-
at a glance that the collocation “culture shock” essary to be extremely cautious before drawing
appeared between the 1950s and the 1970s and conclusions, if any, from investigations like
has dramatically grown in frequency since the these. Anyway, the data analyzed confirm that
1980s. The same tools provide evidence of the that there are resources and tools that can support
emergence and decline of the collocation be- the investigation of huge amount of data, point-
tween culture and refinement around the publica- ing to interesting research areas to be analyzed
tion of Arnold’s seminal Culture and Anarchy in with more refined ad hoc tools. In any case a
the late 19th century. rewarding exploration of these data from a cul-
tural perspective can perhaps only come as the
result of teamwork in the context of a multidisci-
plinary approach in the growing research field of
the Digital Humanities.
Reference
C. Barker (2003). Cultural Studies: Theory and
practice. London: SAGE.
Z. Bauman. (2011). Culture in a Liquid Modern
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3.2. Early English Books Online M. Gatto (2014). Web as Corpus. Theory and Prac-
tice. London: Bloomsbury.
A further attempt at casting a backward look to M. Gatto (2011). “Sketches of CULTURE from the
envisage the changing face of the world “cul- web. A preliminary study”. In G. Dimartino, L. Lom-
ture” over time has been finally made by using bardo, S. Nuccorini (eds.). Challanges for the 21st
data from the EEBO corpus available through Century. Dilemmas, Ambiguities, Directions. vol. II,
Sketch Engine. Roma: Edizioni Q, pp. 275-283.
A. Holliday (1999). “Small cultures”. Applied Lin-
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A. McEnery, H. Baker (2016). Corpus Linguistics and
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culture using millions of digitized books”. Science,
331(6014):176–182.
R. Williams (1985). Keywords. A Vocabulary of Cul-
ture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Resources and tools:
Early English Books Online,
https://eebo.chadwyck.com/home
Google Books Ngram Viewer,
https://books.google.com/ngrams
Google Books (British English),
http://googlebooks.byu.edu/x.asp
Sketch Engine, https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/
[reference stub]