The Vices of If, or, How Conjunctions Signify in a Billion-Word Corpus

This paper, emerging from a book project on Shakespeare’s use of particular formal features, will explore the computational possibilities of the full-text resources in the Early English Books Online database. Specifically, I will use various programs and portals to investigate the conjunction “if” in its literary, rhetorical, syntactic, and epistemological contexts. To accomplish this work, I will draw on collaborations with computer scientists, computational linguists, and historians of science. The aim is not so much to perform a “distant” or “close” reading of “if” as to achieve a sort of middle-distance interpretive history. Such a reading allows us 1) to view the changing semantic functions of “if” in early modern English culture and 2) to situate instantiations of “if” in the context of those changing functions. When Shakespeare’s Shylock asks, “If you prick us [Jews], do we not bleed?” what cultural possibilities does his syntax actuate? When Portia, in the same play, says to her soon-to-be husband, “if you do love me, you will find me out,” how does her “if” compare? The paper’s main claim is that in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, “if” acquired a strong association with knowledge production, specifically in the context of the rise of skepticism and empiricism as scientific principles. If indeed early modern Europe set the scene, as it were, for modern science, then the epistemological heft of “if” makes it the most important word in the world