Counting Elmore’s Adverbs

What happens when you set linguists loose upon literature?

It all started with Terrence Rafferty making a claim, in The New York Times, on the occasion of the release of 3:10 to Yuma, about the relative chattiness of Elmore Leonard's characters:

Mr. Leonard tends to like it chilly, though: no warming sentiment, no gassy speeches, just behavior in all its unaccountable variety. When the market for western fiction dried up in the early ‘60s, and he began to write the eccentric contemporary crime novels that have since enlarged his reputation, the characters got chattier, but it’s mostly the villains.

This sets off alarm bells over at Language Log. Over breakfast—I kid you not—Mark Liberman decides to count lines of dialogue against total lines of prose in selected chapters of handily available Elmore Leonard novels—western and crime. The result?

• Western novel: 54.9% talk
• Crime novel: 46.8 % talk

There’s more, but you get the point. Critics assert and hope for the best; scientists actually count.

Then, on Friday, Liberman pulled off the same trick, this time over something B. R. Myers once said about Elmore Leonard. Myers pointed to a stray adverbial phrase that contradicted Leonard’s own (famous) dictum against adverbs. “What good is an aesthetic,” Myers wanted to know, “if it has to be cheated into accommodating the things that count?”

But is Leonard cheating or is he just writing as he has always written, his declared aesthetic be damned? Liberman is on the case.

He finds “Leonard’s rate of adjective use is actually on the high side, relative to general prose norms. I didn’t count his quotative adverbials and appositives, but my guess would be that he uses them at a rate comparable to what you’d find in some romance novels.”

I, for one, am disappointed he didn’t count up all the quotative adverbials and appositives, but what’s important is that science prevails:

Myers’ point about Leonard’s sidelong glances at big emotional and moral issues is a serious one. (If you don’t like this kind of moral indirection, though, I think you need to blame its sources, which include Twain and Hemingway as well as Hammett and Bogart.) But when he supports this point with the implicit claim that Leonard’s western novels are richer in quotative adverbials than his crime novels are, I wish, not for the first time, that we lived in a culture where humanists were used to testing their empirical generalizations against ascertainable fact.

ADDITIONALLY: The Remarkable B. R. Myers Revealed; Elmore’s Rules for Westerns

PREVIOUSLY: “Ok, on to a brief introduction to the fellat- family.”; B. R. Myers corrects me!