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Task D - Our analysis: Steinbeck
Text 1: A short extract from John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men
His eyes were very dark brown and there was a hint of brown pigment
in his eyeballs.(1) His cheek-bones were high and wide, and strong
deep lines cut down his cheeks, in curves beside his mouth.(2) His
lower lip was long, and since his teeth protruded, the lips stretched
to cover them, for this man kept his lips closed.(3) His hands were
hard, with broad fingers and nails as thick and ridged as little
clam shells.(4) The space between thumb and forefinger and the hams
of his hands were shiny with callus.(5)
(John Steinbeck , The Grapes of Wrath, Ch.
1)
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The lexis of the Steinbeck passage also feels very simple in lexical
terms. There are three main reasons for this.
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Firstly, most of the words are from our basic common-core vocabulary
(e.g. 'eyes', 'brown', 'little'), giving the vocabulary a very basic
feel. Arguably the only exception is 'protruded', though ''pigment'
might also be included.
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Secondly, the lexis is restricted almost entirely to body parts
and their physical qualities, and hence to the physical bodily description
of the man being described (notice how focused the description seems).
There are a few repetitions of lexically full words, all referring
to physical attributes of the man ('brown', 'lips', 'hands' and the
morpheme 'eye' in 'eyes' and 'eyeballs'), which emphasise the restriction
of the description to the man's physical appearance. The only other
repetitions are of grammatical words, with 'his' being particularly
prominent (occurring 10 times (11%) in 92 words). This also indicates
how much the focus of the description is restricted to just one individual.
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Thirdly, the words in the passage are very simple in structural
terms. We can show this by looking at the syllable structure of the
words in the passage. Below we repeat the Steinbeck passage to show
the syllable structure of the words in it. Single-syllable words are
printed normally. But we have coloured 2-syllable words green and
3-syllable words red.
Syllable count
His eyes were very dark brown and there was a hint
of brown pigment in his eyeballs.(1)
His cheek-bones were high and wide, and strong deep
lines cut down his cheeks, in curves beside his mouth.(2)
His lower lip was long, and since his teeth protruded,
the lips stretched to cover them, for this man kept
his lips closed.(3) His hands were hard, with broad fingers
and nails as thick and ridged as little clam shells.(4)
The space between thumb and forefinger
and the hams of his hands were shiny with callus.(5)
Syllable statistics:
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1-syllable words
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79
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(86%)
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2-syllable words
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12
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(12%)
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3-syllable words
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2
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(2%)
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Total words
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92
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(100%)
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There are no words at all which are longer than three syllables.
This passage is thus very simple in lexical terms. The vast majority
of words have only one syllable, and there are no words at all more than
three syllables long (compare 'unequivocal' and 'intergalactic', which
have five syllables each and 'antirevolutionary' and 'unenthusiastically',
which have eight syllables each). So the evidence from the syllable structure
of words parallels what we found when we looked at sentence length.
Back to Task
D
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