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Is the truthfulness of a proposition verifiable through access to reference corpora?

Abstract This paper reviews Louw’s (1993 and subsequent publications) deployment of reference corpora in the light of existing philosophical and linguistic milestones when it comes to the notion of the truthfulness of a proposition. Louw (William Ernest. 1993. Irony in the text or insincerity in the writer? The diagnostic potential of semantic prosodies. In Mona Baker, Gill Francis & Elena Tognini-Bonelli (eds.), Text and technology: In honour of John Sinclair, 152–176. Amsterdam: John Benjamins) resorts to reference corpora in order either to explicate a rhetorical device (in Louw 1993, that of irony) or to attempt to reveal the true attitude of the speaker to his/her own proposition (including instances of insincerity). Using two methods (co-selection and wildcarding), an author’s collocational patterns in context are checked against those in the reference corpus, also in context. The frequent lexical variables of grammar strings are taken to represent that string’s corpus-derived subtext. Recently, Louw’s Contextual Prosodic Theory (CPT) has revealed the mechanism of prospection, whereby the grammatical pattern in the first line of a poem anticipates by its most frequent lexical collocates the themes in the remainder of the poem (Louw, Bill & Milojkovic, Marija. 2016. Corpus stylistics as contextual prosodic theory and subtext, 176–183. Amsterdam: John Benjamins). The philosophical background of Louw’s CPT is the works of Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein (Louw, William Ernest. 2010a. Collocation as instrumentation for meaning: A scientific fact. In Willie van Peer, Vander Viana & Sonia Zyngier (eds.), Literary education and digital learning: methods and technologies for humanities studies, 79–101. Hershey, PA: IGI Global and subsequent works) and could be said to be in need of further explanation and illustration. The paper discusses Louw’s take on insincerity (1993) as the speaker’s attitude to the truthfulness of her own statement from the point of view of Frege’s Sinn/Bedeutung distinction, Russell’s logical language, and Wittgenstein’s attitude to the relationship between language and reality. Since prospection may be considered objective proof of the effectiveness of Louw’s approach, an instance of prospection from a poem by Brodsky is used to show that Wittgenstein’s concern for the truthfulness of propositions may be viewed as both the guarantor and the beneficiary of Louw’s views. Additionally, the paper presents an example of prospection in the first line of a novel, Don DeLillo’s White Noise. However, other grammatical patterns in the passage studied in this paper do not contain deviations from the corpus norm, which conforms to the existing commentary on DeLillo in the field of literary criticism. The paper concludes by stating that reference corpora used inductively (Louw, William Ernest. 2017. Uneasy humour as discovery: Collocation and empathy as Whewellian consilience. Studying Humour: International Journal 4) may shed light on the speaker’s attitude to the truthfulness of their own statement.