We sketch an interdisciplinary method of “linguistic patho- chronology”, i.e. the dating of a literary work by resorting to information from areas that are not necessarily simultaneously available: verbal information (the literary work), medical information (biography), contextual information (larger issues of biography). The method is applied to a concrete case: Mihai Eminescu’s last poems. What we hope to achieve is a more accurate chronology of these poems on the basis of linguistic evidence in medical context. We start by a concise presentation of the method; we then focus on a presentation of some medical and linguistic facts that are relevant for our case: the bipolar disorder type 1 that Eminescu seems to have suffered from, as mirrored in speech characteristics of the bipolar spectrum. We follow Nica 1972, who diagnosed Eminescu as suffering from manic-depressive psychosis, a conclusion that had been drawn also by Obersteiner and Leidesdorf (Vienna, 1883, 1984), Nothnagel, Meinert, Neumann (cf. Prelipceanu 2015: 104), as well as by Maiorescu (cf. Simion 2015: 11); similar conclusions have been drawn by a team of Romanian researchers coordinated by Simion, Popescu and Pop in 2015 (bipolar disorder I). The method thus sketched is susceptible of being used in at least two directions: dating a literary work by using medical records; dating a medical disorder by using literary records (in the latter sense one example is notorious: in 1934 Abrams derived from literary productions important information on opium use and related medical problems).
Key words:
language-based patho-chronology, frame semantics, bipolar language, manic language, depressive language
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