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Prose

Notes Swift is also known for Gulliver’s Travels, a book of fantasy, satire, and political allegory, much like
his other, shorter works. He wrote Gulliver’s Travels in 1725, and it was published in 1726. The
book was a great success throughout the British Empire, and it contributed to Swift’s fame and
legitimacy as a writer and social commentator.
For the majority of his life, Swift was a victim of Meniere’s disease, which affects balance and
hearing and causes nausea and dizziness. When Swift was about 72 years old, his disease began
to keep him from his duties and social life. He became withdrawn and deeply depressed. Swift
died in October 1745. He was buried in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where he had worked as dean.
Swift was a great friend of Alexander Pope, a fellow satirist best known for “Rape of the Lock.” In
a letter to Pope, Swift once called himself a misanthrope, but it seems more likely that he was
simply frustrated by people who chose not to use the logic and reason they possessed.

26.1 Critical Appreciation

The full-text of “Hints Toward an Essay on Conversation,” an essay by Jonathan Swift on the use
of language. This plain text version was taken from Gulliver’s Travels and Other Works by Jonathan
Swift.
In the spring of 2002, I read Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels for the first time as an adult. Soon
after, while following a brief electronic discussion on the CORPORA mailing list about the historical
background of corpus linguistics, I realized that Swift could arguably be proposed as an illustrious
forerunner of this new way of studying language. The main justification for my proposal is that
Swift’s writings abound in allusions to a dimension of language which makes the corpus linguistics
enterprise possible. Swift, centuries before the advent of the mainframe and personal computer,
shows in his only novel, and indeed throughout his work, an awareness of the physical dimension
of language and an appreciation of language as phonic or graphic substance. In this paper I would
therefore like to nominate Jonathan Swift as a major precursor of corpus linguistics. Indeed, had
he not been such a devoted anti-papist, I might suggest he be canonized as patron saint of all those
students of language who compile corpora to further their study.
Background
By the spring of 2002, the field of corpus linguistics, after some years of struggle to establish itself
as a legitimate way of doing linguistics followed by a period of demarcation and self-vindication,
had attained a degree of self-confidence within the language sciences. Some corpus linguists
(Francis, 1992) had earlier begun to take stock and to examine the historical background of this
sub-discipline.
A discussion began on its longest-standing and most prestigious mailing list, CORPORA, held at
Bergen University in Norway, and various proposals were made for key texts, seminal works and
landmarks in the intellectual pre-history of this suddenly fashionable school of linguistics. Rightly
enough, key texts from the 1970s (McH Sinclair, 1970) were proposed as being seminal or formative.
Pre-computer-age marvels of calculation and generalization were cited, most notably Markov
(1912) and Zipf (1936), who, with their laborious ‘manual’ computations, paved the way for
present-day researchers in Language Engineering who still extract Zipf distributions and Markov
models from corpora. Herculean feats of manual concordancing were mentioned - for example,
Cruden’s Complete Concordance to the Old and New Testaments (1796).
I promptly posted a proposal of Jonathan Swift as precursor of corpus linguistics and then the
thread came to an end. This may have been due to the divagation inherent in my mailing or
because I arrived when attention was already shifting to other issues: that particular conversation
had run its course. Indeed many practitioners of corpus linguistics perhaps thought it was time to
return to more pressing workaday matters and leave the history for another time. In the rest of
this paper, I would like to develop the idea I posted to the CORPORA debate.

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