Cultural entrenchment of folktales is encoded in language

Abstract

In this interdisciplinary study, we explore the understudied effects of growing cultural entrenchment on the form of stories with a long reproduction history. Drawing on insight from literary theory, theoretical linguistics, and cultural evolution theory, we argue that changes in the cultural entrenchment of fairy tales and folk stories are reflected in (small) structural 'mutations' in the story. More specifically, we aim to show that with the increasing familiarity of "Little Red Riding Hood", its story frame and characters have gradually become part of the author and audience's shared world knowledge, which is encoded in the type of linguistic devices used to introduce the characters. To this end, we performed a Bayesian logistic regression analysis on a diachronic collection (late 18th century-2015) of the world's most iconic fairy tale, using automatically generated time estimations for a subset of undated reproductions in the story lineage, and including these estimates and approximated measurement errors in the statistical model. Results show that there is indeed a marked increase of linguistic markers that indicate that the characters are already known or "accessible" to the audience. This development reflects the author's changing intuitions and beliefs about the familiarity of the story, and, indirectly, the changing expectations of the story's audience regarding the appearance of certain characters in the story frame. Notably, this study is the first to quantitatively describe the diachronic development of a story (and the concepts associated with it) into the realm of 'shared knowledge', showing that it is a slow and gradual process. The results help refine our understanding of cultural evolution as well as the workings of speaker-addressee dynamics. Conceptualising the observed linguistic mutations as an instance of guided variation, we argue that the increase of definite first mentions as a function of cultural entrenchment can be treated as an example of variation guided by pragmatic principles such as Grice's Maxim of Quantity, making character introductions as informative as (and not more informative than) required.

Қазақ Және Ағылшын Тілдеріндегі Аңыздарда Кездесетін Кейіпкерлердің Эмоцияларын Лингвомәдени Тҧрғыдан Талдау

“…Явление культурного укоренения с долгой историей воспроизведения одного и того же литературного произведения исследовалось в работе F. Karsdorp (2019). Рассматривая варианты известных сказок, автор акцентировал внимание на том, что с возрастанием количества интерпретаций увеличивается и количество лингвистических маркеров.…”

Stories in Action

“…One proposal is that they emerge because of cultural heterogeneity in early socialization practices and exposure to different environmental conditions that involve routine engagement in tasks that strengthen these preferences ( Gelfand et al, 2011 ). Second, cultural schemas impact the way stories are processed and told ( Karsdorp & Fonteyn, 2019 ). These schemas are defined as widely shared knowledge structures that provide default assumptions about an event’s characteristics and relations to other events ( DiMaggio, 1997 ; Fiske & Linville, 1980 ).…”

Bearing a Bag-of-Tales: An Open Corpus of Annotated Folktales for Reproducible Research

“…(2.1.2) Accessing and growing the corpus Snapshot versions of the aft corpus will be cached on Zenodo with development and collaboration ongoing in the trilogy GitHub repository, where a vignette provides information on how to access, use, and augment the dataset. 11 Whereas long-term sustainability to curate the result will require academic resources, as a next step it would be logical to create temporary merger options with other multilingual tale collections, such as the MFTD, or the ones analyzed by Tehrani (2013) or Karsdorp and Fonteyn (2019), for analytical studies using for instance multilingual word embeddings.…”

“…The first is a focus on the evolutionary aspect of motif and/or tale type distributions, either with regard to certain tale types (Bortolini et al, 2017;Karsdorp, 2016;Karsdorp & van den Bosch, 2013;da Silva & Tehrani, 2016;Tehrani, 2013), or to the geographical distribution of globally occurring narrative motifs (Thuillard, d'Huy, Berezkin, & Le Quellec, 2018), even inferring the presence of lost narratives (Kestemont et al, 2022). A genetic metaphor seems to inform some approaches, perhaps inspired by the modelling capacities inherent in Dawkins' meme theory (Dawkins, 1976); these compare tale types as motif sequences to 'narrative DNA' (Darányi, Wittek, & Forró, 2012;Meder et al, 2016;Murphy, 2015;Ofek, Darányi, & Rokach, 2013), or look at the evolution of narrative/story networks as a quasi-biological process based on the mutation and recombination of narrative elements (Karsdorp, 2016;Karsdorp & Fonteyn, 2019), extended even to the framework of cultural evolution via population genetics (Ross, Greenhill & Atkinson, 2013;Ross & Atkinson, 2015). Such methods resemble bioinformatic applications such as network motif identification (Qin & Gao, 2012), a problem analogous with ours.…”