When Letters Talk Back: A Multi-Language Case Study of Ordinal Linguistic Personification
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2013
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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Thesis (B.A.)
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Abstract
Synesthesia as a topic is one that has been studied for generations, and is only
now beginning to be understood. As many as 1 in 23 people is in some way
synesthetic, and yet we still have little idea as to the workings or structures that cause
it. Synesthesia is a difficult phenomenon to rigidly define, but essentially it is the
cross-connection of two different sensory or perceptory modalities, in which one
sense (such as sight) consistently triggers a response of another one (such as touch).
The result is people who have powerful associations between different types of
sensory stimuli. Synesthesia comes in many forms, with some more common (and
more studied) than others.
This paper focuses on one particular type of synesthesia, called Ordinal
Linguistic Personification (OLP). People who manifest OLP tend to perceive certain
ordered sequences, such as letters, numbers, or days of the week, as having very
strong personalities. These personality constructs come into conflict with one another
in math problems, give rise to scheduling difficulties, or sometimes make for amusing
commentary on the spelling of a person's name.
Much of this paper will be dedicated to a case study of one particular person
with OLP. E.S. natively speaks both Russian and English, and is conversationally
fluent in French and competent in Chinese. As such, over the course of the case
study I will be looking at how E.S. manifests OLP in each of her different languages.
Our goal is to essentially use the differences in concurrents to triangulate some of the
cognitive processes that OLP operate on.