Reuven Tsur

• Phd
• Professor Emeritus at Tel Aviv University

This book is a collection of studies providing a unique view on two central aspects of poetry: sounds and emotive qualities, with emphasis on their interactions. The book addresses various theoretical and methodological issues related to topics like sound symbolism, poetic prosody, and voice quality in recited poetry. The authors examine how these...

Poems, as aesthetic objects, generate a subjective experience, which can be different for different readers. In this paper, we propose a method to quantify these subjective experiences. We gave participants three parallel excerpts and asked them to describe, in free text, the perceived emotive qualities of these excerpts. The descriptions were anal...

This is an instrumental exploration of theoretical issues related to the vocal performance of Mediaeval Hebrew pegs-and-cords meter, of which we have neither authentic recordings, nor verbal descriptions of actual performances of the time. Consequently, I am exploring only possibilities implied by poetic structures as embodied in later performances...

This paper describes a structural account of phonetic symbolism and submits it to empirical investigation. To enable testing for possible iconic sound–emotion relations, participants compared pairs of syllables (e.g., ma – ba ) as well as pairs of emotional states (e.g., joyful – sad) on various perceptual scales (e.g., softness). In addition, we r...

There is a growing research literature on phonetic symbolism in poetry, sometimes with incongruent results. Through a theoretical structural analysis we show that, (a) individual speech sounds have (sometimes conflicting) potentials to suggest elementary percepts, such as abruptness, hardness, smoothness; and (b) from these elementary percepts some...

This article proposes a structuralist-cognitive approach to phonetic symbolism that conceives of it as of a flexible process of feature abstraction, combination, and comparison. It is opposed to an approach that treats phonetic symbolism as "fixed relationships" between sound and meaning. We conceive of speech sounds as of bundles of acoustic, arti...

This study submits to empirical investigation an old idea of Tsur’s regarding the effect of enjambment on the perceived subtleness of irony in a poetic passage. We submitted two versions of a Milton passage to over 50 participants with “background in literary studies”, ranging from undergraduates to tenured professors, asking them to rate the perce...

This study explores the acoustic properties of a certain “softened” voice quality adopted by some professional poetry readers for emotive expression. We show that several acoustic features may serve as cues for softened voice, including: breathy voice, low intensity, and, possibly, reduced tempo and restrained dynamics of intensity and pitch contou...

This essay integrates what I have written on the contribution of meter and rhythm to emotional qualities in poetry, opposing them to emotional contents. I distinguish between “meaning-oriented” approaches and “perceived effects” approaches, adopting the latter; and adopt a qualitative (rather than quantitative) method of research. Providing a simpl...

This study explores the acoustic properties of a certain "softened" voice quality adopted by some professional poetry readers for emotive expression. We show that several acoustic features may serve as cues for softened voice, including: Breathy voice, low intensity, and, possibly, reduced tempo and restrained dynamics of intensity and pitch contou...

In the performance of poetry, some performers occasionally use a certain ‘softened’ voice quality, deviating from that of the context, for emotive expression. We explored how listeners perceive such instances through a combined methodology of eliciting open-ended descriptions and ratings of pre-defined terms on ordinal scales. The collected respons...

This paper presents in a nutshell aspects of the author’s research in poetry reading (rhythmical performance and voice quality). At the beginning it states the impossibility of straightforward instrumental research in poetic rhythm, and suggests a work-around within a comprehensive theory (the Perception-Oriented Theory of Metre). All rules for met...

Dr. Johnson suggested that "blank verse is often verse for the eye?' If this were true, it would apply even more to free verse. The empty space that indicates line endings in printed verse is not available in vocal performance. I claim that just as white spaces break up the series of black marks on the paper into smaller perceptual units whose end...

This article assumes that poets use "masculine" and "feminine" rhymes not only in order to conform with conventions based on grammatical rules, but also because they are heard different. It explores possible combinations of two independent variables: stress placement in, and phonetic structure of, rhyme words. Masculine rhyme in the tonic-syllabic...

This is a follow-up note to an old article of mine, published in Style (Tsur "Poetic Conventions"). That article asks the question where do poetic conventions come from, arguing against a "migration" or "influence-hunting" approach. My answer is based on a conception of cognitive constraints; ultimately, on the natural constraints of the human brai...

This non-article explores the limitations of applying brain science in “higher” disciplines. Many brain scientists believe that it is only a matter of time that everything human will be accounted for by the findings of brain science. Michael Polányi in the nineteen-sixties and recently Michael Gazzaniga argued against such determinism. They say tha...

In our everyday life we are flooded by a pandemonium of information which consciousness organizes into more easily manageable phonetic and semantic categories. In poetry reading, however, the total effect of a poem is not only obtained by some of these categories but also by precategorial information, for which there is a growing body of empirical...

The articles assembled in Semblance and Signification explore linguistic and literary structures from a range of theoretical perspectives with a view to understanding the extent, prevalence, productivity, and limitations of iconically grounded forms of semiosis. With the complementary examination of large theoretical issues, extensive corpus analys...

Where do poetic conventions come from? I argue that they are active cognitive (sometimes depth-psychological) processes and constraints that became fossilized in time. I confront two rival approaches to conventions, the migration (or influence-hunting) approach, and the cognitive-fossils (or constraints-seeking) approach. The migration approach tra...

According to Jakobson, the poetic function forces readers or listeners more than other linguistic functions to attend to the signifiers in linguistic signs, away from the signifieds. This it does by superimposing similarity on contiguity. As to aesthetic qualities, when you say “The music is sad”, or “This poem is sad”, you do not refer to a mental...

Certain verbal structures have been pointed out in Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem »The Windhover« as typical, and conducive to an ecstatic effect: tongue-twisters, adjective pileups, the scarcity of finite verbs and the use of such verbs as hurl and achieve as nouns. The relationship between such verbal devices and ecstatic quality is usually assumed,...

This paper assumes that crucial mental activities involved in scientific discovery and literary reponse are nonconceptual. Some of the greatest scientific discoveries were made in states of extreme mental passivity induced in “the Bus, the Bath, or the Bed“(Köhler 1972: 163). Universities usually teach techniques and conceptual systems required for...

[True musical delight] consists onely in apt Numbers, fit quantity of Syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one Verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings. This paper explores the dynamics of the rhythmical performance of poetry. It is about the rhythmic structure of the first six lines of Paradise Lost, their vocal p...

This is a theoretical and methodological statement of what isn’t and what is Cognitive poetics. It is focused on Peter Stockwell’s discussion of deixis; but, I claim, much of what I have to say on Stockwell’s work would apply to some degree to the work of many other critics. I argue that Stockwell translates traditional critical terms into a “cogni...

In eleventh century Hebrew poetry there was a convention that poets payed homage to some great poet by writing a poem similar to one of his poems, in the same metre, using the same monorhyme, and adopting some of its key expressions. In this article I am comparing such a "minimal pair" of poems, one by the great poet Shlomo Ibn Gabirol, and an homa...

This paper distinguishes between synaesthesia as a neuropsychological and a literary phenomenon. In the former the sensations themselves are derived from two sensory domains, in the latter the terms that refer to them. While in the former sense associations are in voluntary and rigidly predictable, the latter leaves room for great flexibility and c...

The following comments grew out from two accidental encounters I had in one week with approaches to literature that involve the cognitive-linguistics oriented work developed by Lakoff, Johnson, Turner, Fauconnier and others. Significantly enough, in both instances I faced groups of scholars who presumed to speak in the name of “Literature and Cogni...

Why do we perceive bass voices as “thick”? Owing to a “mediated association” with “thick people and animals [who] are usually loud and resonant”, or owing to some “subtle inter-sensory quality” found in thick things and bass voices? The present paper rejects the former possibility and endorses the latter. As to speech-sound symbolism, I account for...

This article is an inquiry into the aesthetic event of the rhythmical performance of poetry. This event typically contains a reciter, a poetic text, and a listener (though the reciter himself may be the listener too). Poetic rhythm is accessible only through some kind of performance, vocalized or silent. Rhythmical performance is not a unitary phen...

One of the central assumptions of the present study is that mystic or religious poetry not just formulates mystic or religious ideas: it somehow converts theological ideas into religious experience, by verbal means. It somehow seems to reach the less rational layers of the mind by some drastic interference with the smooth functioning of the cogniti...

This article explores issues of versification as an epitome of cultural programs. It is devoted to the question of how cognitive processes shape and constrain cultural and literary forms. It assumes that the generation of culture is governed by adaptation devices exploited for cultural and aesthetic ends. The argument is propounded in four stages....

This article attempts a brief synthesis of two of my research areas: sound symbolism and poetic rhythm, focussed on Simon Russel Beale's performance of Gloucester's first soliloquy in Richard III. It explores three structural relationships between phoneti c cues and their effects: redundancy (when several phonetic cues combine to the same effect);...

This book represents the state of the art in cognitive stylistics a rapidly expanding field at the interface between linguistics, literary studies and cognitive science. The twelve chapters combine linguistic analysis with insights from cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics in order to arrive at innovative accounts of a range of literary a...

Meditative poetry has the ability to reproduce aspects of the meditative experience. In this paper we explore this ability, trying to clarify the phenomenon by pointing out the cognitive processes involved. We focus on Christian Jesuit meditation and pinpoint one of its most effective elements: “the composition of place“. We argue that three main a...

In his article, "Translation Studies, Cultural Context, and Dante," Reuven Tsur explores limits of legitimacy in translation studies. Tsur's approach is a critique of the theoretical assumptions and their application in Edoardo Crisafulli's cultural interpretation of Seamus Heaney's decisions in translating the Ugolino episode in Dante's Inferno. C...

This article explores some cognitive and aesthetic principles about picture poems. It regards language as a hierarchy of signs: the graphemic string signifies a phonological string, which signifies units of meaning, which signify referents in extralinguistic reality. Our linguistic competence urges us to reach the final referents as fast as possibl...

The gestalt notion "figure-ground phenomenon" refers to the characteristic organization of perception into a figure that `stands out' against an undifferentiated background. What is figural at any one moment depends on patterns of sensory stimulation and on the momentary interests of the perceiver. Figure-ground relationship is an important element...

This paper is a critique of George Lakoff's theory and practice as presented in his "Contemporary Theory of Metaphor" (Lakoff 1993). It addresses the issue on several planes, on each plane comparing Lakoff's approach to some alternative. The highest plane, affording the widest perspective, concerns two approaches to interpretation and scientific th...

In this essay I provide a comprehensive cognitive view of rhyme, one of the most powerful resources of poetic language. Readers and critics have strong intuitions on the matter of rhyme but find it difficult systematically to address its manifestations and the construction of its overall affect in the poetic passage. Hence critics all too frequentl...

This paper assumes that the literary work of art is a "stratified system of norms", and that the description of each stratum may require a different kind of logic. One of the main problems is the meaningful integration of these descriptions. A speech sound may be described on an acoustic, a phonetic and a phonemic level; normally, its acoustic desc...

This article explores the correlations and relative frequencies of certain prosodic structures in Mediaeval Hebrew Poetry, where metre is based on systematic manipulation of shorter and longer vowels (schwas versus full vowels). These correlations and frequencies cannot be accounted for by the explicit poetics of the period. It is assumed here that...

This paper is a contribution to the aesthetics of disorientation. It conceives of aesthetic effects such as the effects of adaptation and other cognitive mechanisms turned to an aesthetic end. The “emotional disorientation” associated with the grotesque and related phenomena is hypothesized to be the unique conscious quality of consciousness turnin...

We report an empirical investigation of the perceived effects of poetry. The relationship between rhyme pattern and Gestalt qualities was investigated by manipulating the rhyme scheme of a four-line stanza. We assumed that the perceived effects of poetry are a function of the degree of perceptual organization that is inherent in, or can be realized...

Examined the aesthetic qualities of trance-inductive (TI) poetry. 41 (university student) readers, classified as low- and high-absorption, read a TI poem characterized by high metric regularity and rated the poem on 7 7-point evaluative scales. While low-absorption Ss found the poem to be boring and unpleasant, high-absorption Ss found the poem to...

The aim of this paper is to explore how the detailed analysis of two jokes may illuminate a comprehensive theory of Cognitive Poetics. Cognitive Poetics is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of literature employing the tools offered by cognitive science: it explores how poetic language, or critical decisions are constrained and shaped by hu...

This paper discusses poetic metaphors on two levels: conceptualization strategies, and the elusive perceptual qualities of a certain kind of metaphor. It also offers a cognitive critique of some of the psychoanalytic attempts of handling the issues under consideration. Some psychoanalysts are more inclined to account for a person's playing the flut...

In this paper I am proposing a cognitive theory and description of the semantic structure of figurative language and rhyme. My assumption is, that an adequate theory of metaphor must satisfy four requirements: 1. to give a structural description of metaphors; 2. to explain how human beings understand novel metaphors; 3. to explain the relationship...

This paper explores some cognitive and aesthetic principles concerning picture poems. It conceives of language as of a hierarchy of signs: the graphemic string signifies a phonological string which signifies units of meaning which signify referents in extralinguistic reality. Our linguistic competence urges us to reach the final referents as fast a...

The cognitive approach in my paper "Rhyme and Cognitive Poetics" has been criticised from the point of view of historical poetics. This paper enumerates the points of criticism and answers them. The following paragraph sums up my position in answer to that criticism: Cognitive Poetics uses quantitative investigations to establish regularities, make...

This paper explores the cognitive foundations and literary applications of spatial imagery. Cognitively, concrete visual images constitute a bundle of features and allow efficient coding of information for creativity. One image encoding many meaning units (an instance of "unity-in-variety") saves mental energy--a possible source of pleasure. The re...

This paper is a brief phonetic investigation of the nature of onomatopoeia. Onomatopoeia is the imitation of natural noises by speech sounds. To understand this phenomenon, we must realize that there is a problem here which is by no means trivial. There i s an infinite number of noises in nature, but only twenty-something letters in an alphabet tha...