02-12-2022, 08:27 PM
Following from Patrick's talk on this topic at the conference I wanted to revisit our discussion here. The research is very interesting and demands that we either identify a cause or adjust our approach to the text. There must be a systematic and pervasive reason for directionality and any theory needs to address it.
When Patrick first posted his findings I thought that line length must be a main cause (we'll leave downwardness to the side for now). Because the rightwardness of a word is relative the positional value of a word in the same ordinal position differs between lines of different lengths. So the third word in a line of nine words has a positional value of 0.333 and the third word in a line of ten words has a value of 0.300.
Thus we could potentially explain rightwardness in this way: words which appear more to the left have the "ability" to make lines longer or words which appear more to the right have the "ability" to make lines shorter. This would not only provide an explanation for the pervasiveness of the effect across multiple different glyph pairs, but also differing strengths of the effect: we're simply dealing with single parameter by which glyphs vary.
A good candidate for that parameter would be word length. Were words starting with/containing a certain glyph to be shorter or longer on average then they would influence how much space is left for more words in that same line. Short words would appear more leftward because they leave more space for further words and appear more frequently in longer lines. All of this should be testable, and I think we may have at least some of the answers already to prove/disprove this hypothesis.
However, I note that [qo] is found to be more leftward than [o], yet words beginning [qo] are definitely longer on average than words beginning [o]. So there must be something else happening. Maybe there is interplay between both the addition of a new word reducing the rightwardness of other words in that line and the likelihood that the new word will begin with a certain glyph. So (ignoring for the moment that last words are excluded) a word beginning [o] in the third position of a nine word line would have its rightwardness reduced by the presence of a tenth word, but if that word began with [o] then the overall rightwardness of all words beginning [o] would be 3/10 + 10/10 = 0.65.
Of course, these explanations aren't likely for individual words pairs, such as [chckhy] and [shckhy], which a) are the same length and b) are unlikely to commonly appear in the same line. So we would be back to explaining the phenomenon by reference to their relationship to other words or selectional procedure which causes them to occur earlier in the line, rather than their ability to control the line length. The question is whether there is such a relationship other than the linestart, and whether those words could influence line length (if they even need to).
I suppose I'm saying that I want to continue discussing this topic, but am not much further forward understanding potential causes. Thoughts?
When Patrick first posted his findings I thought that line length must be a main cause (we'll leave downwardness to the side for now). Because the rightwardness of a word is relative the positional value of a word in the same ordinal position differs between lines of different lengths. So the third word in a line of nine words has a positional value of 0.333 and the third word in a line of ten words has a value of 0.300.
Thus we could potentially explain rightwardness in this way: words which appear more to the left have the "ability" to make lines longer or words which appear more to the right have the "ability" to make lines shorter. This would not only provide an explanation for the pervasiveness of the effect across multiple different glyph pairs, but also differing strengths of the effect: we're simply dealing with single parameter by which glyphs vary.
A good candidate for that parameter would be word length. Were words starting with/containing a certain glyph to be shorter or longer on average then they would influence how much space is left for more words in that same line. Short words would appear more leftward because they leave more space for further words and appear more frequently in longer lines. All of this should be testable, and I think we may have at least some of the answers already to prove/disprove this hypothesis.
However, I note that [qo] is found to be more leftward than [o], yet words beginning [qo] are definitely longer on average than words beginning [o]. So there must be something else happening. Maybe there is interplay between both the addition of a new word reducing the rightwardness of other words in that line and the likelihood that the new word will begin with a certain glyph. So (ignoring for the moment that last words are excluded) a word beginning [o] in the third position of a nine word line would have its rightwardness reduced by the presence of a tenth word, but if that word began with [o] then the overall rightwardness of all words beginning [o] would be 3/10 + 10/10 = 0.65.
Of course, these explanations aren't likely for individual words pairs, such as [chckhy] and [shckhy], which a) are the same length and b) are unlikely to commonly appear in the same line. So we would be back to explaining the phenomenon by reference to their relationship to other words or selectional procedure which causes them to occur earlier in the line, rather than their ability to control the line length. The question is whether there is such a relationship other than the linestart, and whether those words could influence line length (if they even need to).
I suppose I'm saying that I want to continue discussing this topic, but am not much further forward understanding potential causes. Thoughts?
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