The article is a research document composed
of 30 pages which includes an abstract, introduction, presentation of data and
data sources, hypothesis, discussion and interpretation, conclusion, notes, and
references. It comprehensively discusses how the word LOVE changed through the
course of time in terms of frequency of use and meaning based on the
researcher’s point of view and his interpretations of data. The researcher used
context-based approach; the analysis is not purely based on participant
criteria, but also on situational knowledge. He also utilized the Prototype
Theory of Concepts and Word Meaning. The model follows the prototype theory of
semantics, which suggests that meaning is situated in domains and organized in
clusters, and that some meanings re more typical than others.
The
researcher identified five central or prototypical ‘loves’ which occur in the
domains of: 1) family, 2) friendship, 3) sexuality, 4) religion, 5) non-human
world. Noteworthy, Lewis’s (1960) The
Four Loves presented the following terminologies:
1. Storge (Affection or family love)
2. Philia (friendship)
3. Eros (sexual love)
4. Agape (religious love)
Moreover, Lewis provided five
clearly differentiated categories of love, which can be defined via the
participants in the following manner:
1. The participants of family love are the family members
2. The participants of friendship are friends
3. The participants of sexual love are lovers
4. In order for love to be religious, God has to be a participant
5. If one of the participants is
non-human, love is situated in the fith category which is called love of things
THE DICTIONARIES
The dictionaries consulted by the
researcher include: 1) The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and 2) Dr. Johnson’s
eighteenth-century Dictionary of the English Language (DEL). Johnson’s five
senses correspond exactly with the 5 categories, as can be seen in his definitions:
1. To regard with passionate affection,
as that of one sex to the other = sexual love
2. To regard with the affection of a
friend = friendship
3. To regard with parental tenderness =
family love
4. To be pleased with = love of things
5. To regard with reverent unwillingness
to offend = religious love
Correspondences
show that Johnson seems to associate parental care chiefly with God. His
definition of love conveys the idea of God as a loving parent whom we must
revere. It is also clear that good will is a more general attitude than
friendship, and that courtship or lewdness are specified aspects of sexual
love. AOD distinguishes fairly well between sexual love, religious love, love
of things, and other love, but family love and friendship merged in its entries
into this category of other. The level of abstraction is high in the definition
of the verb, where OED only distinguishes between loving a personal object and
loving a thing.
ON PROTOTYPE THEORY
The
researcher was able to demonstrate how to apply the prototype theory of
semantics in an actual research. In my opinion, I think this could be
replicated if one intends to do a prototype-semantics analysis. The whole
procedure is based on the way that the mind probably deals with concepts,
through prototypical representations and contextual information. Love is
considered a large conceptual cluster, which consists of five principal smaller
clusters: family love, friendship, sexual love, religious love, and love of
things. These major categories are
defined both in terms of their participants and in terms of the domains where
they occur:
1. Family love occurs within the family
2. Friendship occurs in the domain of
the world at large, between people whose mutual love is not based on the family
situation or sexual relationship
3. Sexual love occurs within the range
of romantic, sexual and erotic relationships and encounters
4. Religious love occurs in a world
defined in terms of God’s dominance
5. Love of things contains the
remaining instances.
Prototype
theory implies degrees of typicality which means that it is likely that loving
a personal object is more typical than loving a thing; or that when one looks
the 5 categories, one of them is likely to be more typical than the others.
Prototypical categories tend to have a family resemblance category. This theory
takes up elements of former theories and moulds a new whole out of them. It acquires a flexible and functional
character through propounding the unsuitability of definition by a set of criteria
attributes.
ECTRALINGUISTIC CONTEXT OF THE MODEL
In
this portion of the article, the researcher also introduces future researchers
to possible issues that would manifest in the conduct of this kind of research.
This way, the reader will be aware possible problems that will manifests in his
research endeavors, and as a result, he will be able to apprehend and plan more
carefully on how he will resolve these issues. There are 3 major issues that
the researcher encountered;
1.
There is what a linguist normally calls synchronic and
diachronic points of view, which concerns two periods separately and together.
2.
It is not only a society which develops and changes but also
every individual.
3.
A topic which relates closely to the latter is the question
of how much of the subject-matter here concerns intercultural or universal
phenomena and how much is typically of the English language.
DATA
The
researcher also opens the minds of his readers on the advantages and
disadvantages of the data that he utilized in this article, and leaves it to
them to decide whether to follow his lead or devise another data gathering
technique that is deemed more effective. Using the corpus data, the researcher
easily access a large and representative collection of texts, that one of this
collection contains evidence of a language (Early Modern English) the speaker
of which can no longer be interviewed; partially the overlapping structure of
the corpora facilitates a comparison with the Present-Day English. On the other
hand, the researcher confronts the problem in deciding whether to treat texts
and genres individually or in groups, and the fact that size does not
necessarily mean quality.
The
data show that love is a much more frequent item in the Early Modern English
sources than in the Present-Day English sources. The Early Modern English
period of the HC cover the years 1500-1710. The present-Day English corpora
were compiled in the 1960s and should represent the then current usage. Sources
include: The Helsinki Corpus (HC), Shakespeare’s prose, Brown and LOB.
EXPECTATIONS
In
this portion, the researcher shows his vision of the study. He already have
presumed results that will guide him in the course of analysis and
interpretation. The main hypothesis concerns changes in the meaning of love,
and especially the five prototypical loves between two different periods. What
could have happened between those periods? Did love become any less powerful,
did its meaning faded?
There
are 3 areas in which people’s world view might have influence the usage of the
word love:
1. Because of the secularization of
Western culture, religious love could have become less frequent towards the
present
2. Early modern society was undoubtedly
more patriarchal and stricter about family hierarchy.
3. The dada could confirm the reality
of a sexual revolution or at least growing courage ang willingness to talk
about sexual love in the 1960s
What
happened to love in various text types? Expressions of affect tend to be most
frequent in personal letters. Face to face conversation, telephone
conversation, letters of recommendation, personal letters, and romance fiction.
More generally, love should be more frequent in the Early Modern oral text
types than in the literate, and more frequent in present day imaginative than
informative prose.
LOVE IN THE TEXTS
In
the interpretation of data, the hypothesis of the researcher is confirmed in
the results of the text type analysis. Love was most frequent in the private
letters in HC and in the category of Romance and Love Story in Brown and LOB. All
the highest figures in HC are in the oral group. After private letters came
sermon, fiction and comedy. Similarly, love is more frequent in the imaginative
than in the informative prose in the Present-Day English corpora. Surprisingly, the category BIBLE in HC
contained very little love. In the Present-Day English corpora it was
surprising that there were categories o informative prose where love was almost
as frequent as in imaginative prose.
Sexual
love should be an issue in romances and love stories, although surprisingly, Early
Modern fiction and comedies contain more love. There is so little religion in
the Present-Day English corpora that religious love cannot be very frequent in
them.
THE PROTOTYPES
Alongside
with the participant analysis, the researcher also relied on contextual
information concerning the domain of love.
Family Love
It
was more frequent in the Early Modern English texts than in the Present-Day
English period, but a comparison between the two periods does not reveal all,
because it was fairly rare in Shakespeare. This is problematic in two ways: 1)
because one could consider the love words in letters quite separately as
formulaic phrases, and 2) because Brown and LOB do not contain any such
correspondence.
Friendship
Friendship was more common than family
love in both periods, but even more frequent in the Early Modern English
period. In the central sense, friendship is a mutual and free relationship
between people who simply enjoy each other’s company, then the more peripheral
senses were much more frequent in this cluster.
The
power relationship between people appears more clearly in the Early Modern
English period, and the data also reflect a more male-oriented view of
friendship in society. It is difficult to consider this as friendship, but all
in all, samples shows the use of the word love in power relationships,
moreover, people are more likely to use the word love when they are not talking
about their friends in the strictest sense.
Sexual Love
It
was indeed the most frequent category in both periods, although it was even
more dominant in the Present-Day English data. The whole process of falling in
love and getting married is described by Kovecses (1986) who sketches both the
ideal and the typical model of romantic love. The peripheral cases include the
dogs behaving according to Kovecses’s model.
Religious Love
God
is the source of love but we may also expect it to mean that the brethren will
love one another. Religious love in its primary sense is God’s love for people,
but God can also inspire love in and among the created. In its secondary sense
religious love is a divinely inspired love between people.
Love of Things
It
is somewhat more frequent in the Present-Day English data than in the early
modern, where it is about as frequent as family love and friendship. The
hypothesis about its becoming more frequent towards the present is hardly
proved but it does become more dominant
with respect to other loves. Love of things was typically a verb category,
while the other loves were more often presented by the noun.
FUZZINESS
The
blurred edges between the categories are quite interesting as the relative
frequency of the categories themselves. According to prototype theory,
fuzziness appears in the categorical peripheries where edges meet and blur. Several
problems were encountered by the researcher:
Problems of Participant Analysis
1. Confusion when the participants
could simultaneously be considered lovers and spouses (should it be taken as
family love or sexual love?)
2. It was not clear what to do with the
texts discussing incest (should it be taken as family love or sexual love?)
3. Homosexuality was not a problem if
it was explicitly stated (should it be taken as sexual love or friendship?)
4. Metonymy was typical of Early Modern
love discourse. (since only a part of the body is mentioned to represent the
whole, should it be love of things or sexual love?)
Domain Problems
5. Smith’s sermon: should it be
considered religious love because it appeared in the sermon or friendship
because it dealt with the relationship between two people who were not family
members or lovers?
6. Taylor’s sermon: it talks explicitly
about sexuality, and just a little about the relationship between Christ and
the Church.
7. The dog, falling in love, the
analysis regards the dog as things but it is behaving like human.
NUMERICAL RESULTS
The
researcher presented a very general discussion of this result which could
somehow be discussed and presented more explicitly and comprehensively to
facilitate better comprehension in the part of the reader. By the way, he
generalized that if the absolute frequencies of the five loves in both periods
will be compared, then each prototype becomes less frequent in the Present-Day
English data because it contains less love.
Proportions
of the prototypical love: Sexual love
and love of things increase, while the proportion of friendship and family love
decrease. Surprisingly, nothing seems to happen in religious love. The results
indicate changes between the relative proportions of the prototypical meanings.
The results are partly analogous and partly contrary to expectations.
CONCLUSION
The
researcher ended the article with the conclusion that generalizes the results
of the study. He made a clear finale for the important principles that were
tackled along the way. He also highlighted the important contributions of this
article in the Linguistics community. Such are as follows:
1. There are strong family resemblances
between these loves, which means that a look at dictionary definitions will
show that their edges meet and blur.
2. It is possible to categorized real
data quite satisfactorily by looking at the participants and context (domain)
of the five loves. However, sometimes the participant analysis can
simultaneously suggest two categories and the contextual information may also
differ from the participant analysis.
3. Statistically, and based on
numerical analysis, the relative frequencies of the five loves have changed
between the two periods.
4. The article further suggests that
love could be considered at several levels of abstraction. Nevertheless, the
study offers a new point of view on the history of love.
This
article therefore, is a good reading material for students of linguistics who
want to further enrich their knowledge in semantics, especially in research
context. Moreover, Five Hundred Years of Love is an indispensible reading
material for linguistic researchers, most especially those who are focusing in
the study of semantics. It provides a model on the conduct of research with
respect to the field it focused with.
Furthermore, I think the article is also good for general readership and
even to novice readers because it presents logical information and explanations
that are easy to understand. But of course, it will demand the general reader
an extra effort to look/research on several terminologies and concepts
presented in the text. Above all, at least background knowledge or a basic
understanding of what semantics and prototype theory is will ease the reading.
To
conclude, the article contains in itself a mystifying effect, that although the
approach of the presentation is research based, it also offers a certain appeal
to the emotion of the reader. Moreover, as I was reading the article, I noticed
that I was constantly having reflections on my personal experiences about love,
trying to reflect on my experiences as a reader and as an individual, and see
through if I would agree and testify to the findings of the researcher, or if I
will contradict him in my introspections.
The
article has its certain aesthetic value, aside from its being factual and
informative. I suspect that this is due to its theme which is LOVE—something
that everyone could relate and experience.
