Malina Nielson and Dr. Cynthia L. Hallen, English Language and Linguistics
During her prolific writing career, nineteenth-century poet Emily Dickinson produced 1,789 poems. Dr. Cynthia Hallen of the English Language and Linguistics Department has been researching and defining all of Emily Dickinson’s words according to the way Dickinson used them for the forthcoming Emily Dickinson Lexicon.
Within the collected poems, Dickinson used approximately 162 place names, almost one-tenth of her words. She knew the history and force these place names would carry and used these few words to communicate volumes. In my project I focused on researching these names, or toponyms, to learn their meanings, histories, and connotations in order to release their power for readers, scholars, and translators of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. All of these names will be included in the Lexicon.
First, I made a list of all the names used in the poems. There were 154 in the beginning. After reading many poems and reevaluating what qualified as a place name, we discovered at least 162, although this number may increase even farther after more research. Then, using primarily the Internet, I researched these names. I had already done some preliminary research years earlier as a volunteer for Dr. Hallen, but my reading and analytic skills were improving, so I was constantly revising the definitions. I spent the summer of 2004 doing this type of research. At this point, Dr. Hallen and I consulted a few times each week and she helped me uncover the most correct etymology (or history of the word) of the place names, interpret the poem in order to understand the toponyms, and helped me decide what information was necessary for the definitions.
In the fall, we began to research together daily. We started writing a paper of our findings for submission to an academic journal. We had to define what a place name really was. Although this may seem obvious, it was hard to discern if a nationality (i.e., “Anglo-Florentine” or “Malay”) was a person or a general nationality and more of a place name. Other names, such as “Capricorn” or “heaven,” were similarly hard to categorize because of their lack of a concrete or fixed place on a map. We concluded that a word was a place name if it referred to a specific place, a general nationality (as opposed to one specific person), a language, or any other geographic entity.
After deciding which proper names were or were not place names, we divided the toponyms by continent or similarly large subcategories. In our first draft of the paper, we discussed toponyms from each area, starting with the continent that had the most place names and moving to the continent with the least names. We discussed many names in each area, choosing place names that were the most interesting or had the most informative discoveries. During this time, we also started a table or chart of all the place names, their part of speech (noun, adjective, adverb, etc.), and their respective country.
As we continued writing, we started searching for the right audience for this paper. We made inquiries and proposals to several journals and found our original choice, the “Names” journal, to be the right one. We also discovered that the Dictionary Society of North America was having a conference in Boston in May of 2005 and so we applied. We were accepted to present our paper. Now that we had a specific audience, we began to look at our paper in a new light. Since we wanted our paper to reflect the enthusiasm that we had about our discoveries and the style of research we were performing, we decided to entirely revamp the organization of our paper. Our new and final draft shows actual definitions for the top ten toponyms, one from each geographic area of the world or universe.
We continued to work on our table and added information about the definitions already written (or not written) for the toponyms in both Webster’s 1828 Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary. Another part of the table showed our tallies of the times that Dickinson used each place name throughout her poetic corpus. These numbers surprised us and helped us choose which toponyms qualified as the top ten.
The paper is now completed and submitted to “Names: A Journal of Onomastics” and I am preparing for my travel to Boston to represent our team of two at the conference by presenting the paper. One invaluable thing that I learned from this project was the ability to write academic prose. One day when I was gathering some information from an earlier draft, I was amazed to see the progress in my writing abilities. I could not believe it had been only a few short months since I had written the earlier draft. Naturally, I am not yet an expert, but I have progressed significantly.
I just graduated in English Language and Linguistics and I feel that this project has given me a head start into the world of academics. I now feel confident in many skills, including my analytical skills (sometimes both Dr. Hallen and I would puzzle over the meaning of a poem for days or weeks, and then discover an even deeper layer months later), my writing skills (my poetry writing, as well as my academic prose writing, has also improved), my research skills, and my knowledge of how things are done in the scholarly realm. Although I am nervous to present our paper in Boston next month, I feel that I will be able to understand and communicate with colleagues of the linguistic and dictionary field because of the experience I gained while completing this project.