Mango Languages

Why Zombies Contribute to Linguistics

I recently watched an independent “zombie flick” called Pontypool. I’m using quotations because it’s not exactly your normal zombie movie – it was more about a disease than what the disease did to people. So what does this have to do with linguistics? Well, in Pontypool, the virus that caused mobs of cannibalistic non-persons to overrun the small eponymous Ontario town wasn’t transmitted by blood, or saliva, or anything biological.  It was in fact transmitted by “infected” words:  if a person heard an infected word, they would begin to repeat it over and over uncontrollably until they essentially couldn’t function, presumably because the virus took over. It would begin to sneak into their sentences. One victim “caught” the virus through the word “sample” – he first was talking about something “simple,” but the infection caught on and, like an uncontrollable tic, he hesitatingly asked the radio DJ he was speaking to if he had any samples to play. Sample. Sample. Samplesamplesample.

The most interesting part of this lexical disease to me was when a doctor in the movie came to the conclusion that only when you understand the infected word does it infect you as well.  As I was watching the movie, I started thinking about what this means linguistically. Judging by the doctor’s explanation, you could be infected only if you had a lexical entry stored for a given infected word and, moreover, you successfully accessed it.  At this point it seemed that this lexical entry was “unleashed” and overpowered all of the other ones stored, causing the newly zombified person to repeat the word over and over.  When the female lead character found herself becoming infected by the word “kill,” the main character tried to “replace” the word, to distract her from “kill,” by eventually saying “Kill is kiss.” He repeated this over and over so that she would, in effect, replace her lexical entry for “kill” with that of “kiss” – a sort of induced or forced aphasia, in my approximation.  This scene ended with the female character saying, “Kill me,” and the male character obliged by giving her a passionate kiss, curing her.

Another way the characters avoided infection was by speaking in a language other than English. The characters determined that only English words were infected, so the doctor spoke his thoughts aloud in Armenian while the male and female lead characters spoke French as best they could.  This part made sense to me, since a French word wouldn’t access an English lexical entry.  Even if the native English speaker accessed the corresponding translation in English after understanding it in French, it wasn’t because the word was spoken and understood in English; rather they traveled to the English entry via the French one. This interpretation assumes that bilinguals have two separate lexicons, however – one for each language.  Psycholinguists and cognitive psychologists differ in their opinions about lexicon, however. What would the implications be if both languages were stored in one common lexicon in the mind?  I think, for this movie, it would mean speaking in another language wouldn’t stop the infection. And what about the “replaced” words, like the “kill is kiss” method? Well, you could argue that this is another “indirect” access to kill’s lexical entry, via “kiss,” perhaps.

In the end, I decided to stop thinking about it because I was going to miss the rest of the movie, but it was an entertaining thought experiment. What do you think – are the “cures” plausible?  Why or why not?  Do you have a better cure for the word-zombies?