Poetic Rhythm: Structure and Performance -- An Empirical Study in Cognitive Poetics
... As R. Tsur [18] comments in his introduction to his book, iambic pentameter has to be treated as an abstract pattern and no strict boundary can be established. The majority of famous English poets of the past, while using iambic pentameter, have introduced violations, which in some cases-as for Milton's Paradise Lost-constitute the majority of verse patterns. ...
... What these sonnets have in common is an identical number of Appraisal Positive/Negative feature (28), a high number of Affect Negative feature (38) vs. Positive ones (11), and the relatively lowest number of Judgement Negative features (10) vs. Positive ones (18). In other words, by decomposing Negative Polarity items into three classes, we managed to show the weakness of sentiment analysis, where Negativity is a cover-all class. ...
... What these sonnets have in common is an identical number of Appraisal Positive/ Negative feature (28), a high number of Affect Negative feature (38) vs. Positive ones (11), and the relatively lowest number of Judgement Negative features (10) vs. Positive ones (18). In other words, by decomposing Negative Polarity items into three classes, we managed to show the weakness of sentiment analysis, where Negativity is a cover-all class. ...
Poetic devices implicitly work towards inducing the reader to associate intended and expressed meaning to the sounds of the poem. In turn, sounds may be organized a priori into categories and assigned presumed meaning as suggested by traditional literary studies. To compute the degree of harmony and disharmony, I have automatically extracted the sound grids of all the sonnets by William Shakespeare and have combined them with the themes expressed by their contents. In a first experiment, sounds have been associated with lexically and semantically based sentiment analysis, obtaining an 80% of agreement. In a second experiment, sentiment analysis has been substituted by Appraisal Theory, thus obtaining a more fine-grained interpretation that combines dis-harmony with irony. The computation for Francis Webb is based on his most popular 100 poems and combines automatic semantically and lexically based sentiment analysis with sound grids. The results produce visual maps that clearly separate poems into three clusters: negative harmony, positive harmony and disharmony, where the latter instantiates the need by the poet to encompass the opposites in a desperate attempt to reconcile them. Shakespeare and Webb have been chosen to prove the applicability of the method proposed in general contexts of poetry, exhibiting the widest possible gap at all linguistic and poetic levels.
... The following section will go further with these three kinds of competences with exploration of convergence and divergence in poetry. Tsur (2012) proposes that the linguistic stress pattern may diverge from the metric pattern to some extent, and that the reader of poetry replies on his metrical set. ...
... Although sophisticated electronic instruments can analyse accurately the sound information, it is impossible to predict from the machine's output the relative weight in the speech, for instance, which one of two consecutive stresses is perceived as stronger. Consequently, Tsur (2012) claims that the integrations of the sound information take place in the brain only by the human ear. Moreover, the acoustic cues for linguistic stress in the order of decreasing effectiveness are intonational inflection, pitch, duration, amplitude. ...
... Tsur's cognitive poetics (Tsur,2008(Tsur, , 2012), Schmidt's noticing hypothesis (Schmidt,2001;Robinson et al.,2012). ...
The present study proposes an interactive model of metalinguistic awareness, poetry and foreign language learning. It aims at examining the influence from poetry-embedded class of English as a foreign language on pupils’ phonological awareness, with considering the relations between their phonological awareness and the factors in ecological learning environment that includes teacher’s instruction, learners’ language learning strategies, linguistic exposure to English that learners receive outside of classroom, and pupils’ feedback on the poetry sequence. Two case studies are conducted to probe into the development of pupils’ phonological awareness in the context of poetry-embedment English class, as well as the relations mentioned above. A combination of quantitative methods and qualitative methods are employed in the current study. The results of quasi-experiment of phonological awareness indicate poetry-embedment English class globally facilitates the development of pupils’ phonological awareness to some extent. Bialystok’s theory (2001, 2012) Schmidt’s noticing hypothesis (Schmidt,2010), and Tsur’s cognitive poetics (2008) are employed to interpret the results of phonological awareness tests.
... There are various ways to deal with this conflict as a reader or speaker -either conforming to the boundary as suggested by the syntax and reading over the line end, or realising a boundary at the line end as suggested by the poems' written presentation thus disrupting the syntactic coherence. [1,2] suggest that there is a third possibility for a speaker, a so-called 'rhythmical performance'. In such a recitation the speaker is said to prosodically convey versification on the one hand and the syntactic structure on the other hand by using both cues for continuation and cues for discontinuation simultaneously. ...
... The subset comprises 20 poems by the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin which were recited by the actor Hanns Zischler for the sake of an exhibition. 2 The recitations of these poems make up 43.65 minutes of speech. The poems vary in length from 9 lines (the shortest poem) to 160 lines (the longest poem) and 568 lines altogether (not counting the reproductions of the poems' titles or of the author name). ...
... As described above, Tsur (2012) demonstrated that speakers signal both continuity and discontinuity at locations of enjambment: discontinuity is signaled by lengthening of the enjambed word, while continuity is signaled by reduced silence between the enjambed word and the following word. In the current work, I sought to test Tsur's hypothesis while also taking into account the intrinsic and contextual factors that influence word and silence duration. ...
... The goal of the analysis was to investigate Tsur's (2012) claim that speakers signal discontinuity at locations of enjambment by increasing vowel (and subsequently, word) duration. Using the modeling method described above, I assessed whether enjambment predicted word duration over and above the other factors known to influence duration at Metric Level 3. The fixed factors in the initial model of Word Duration were Enjambment, Segment Number, Word Class, Lexical Frequency, Syntactic Structure, Text Emphasis, Inter-stanza repetition, and the interactions between Frequency/Word Class, and Syntactic Structure/Word Class. ...
Word durations convey many types of linguistic information, including intrinsic lexical features like length and frequency and contextual features like syntactic and semantic structure. The current study was designed to investigate whether hierarchical metric structure and rhyme predictability account for durational variation over and above other features in productions of a rhyming, metrically-regular children's book: The Cat in the Hat (Dr. Seuss, 1957). One-syllable word durations and inter-onset intervals were modeled as functions of segment number, lexical frequency, word class, syntactic structure, repetition, and font emphasis. Consistent with prior work, factors predicting longer word durations and inter-onset intervals included more phonemes, lower frequency, first mention, alignment with a syntactic boundary, and capitalization. A model parameter corresponding to metric grid height improved model fit of word durations and inter-onset intervals. Specifically, speakers realized five levels of metric hierarchy with inter-onset intervals such that interval duration increased linearly with increased height in the metric hierarchy. Conversely, speakers realized only three levels of metric hierarchy with word duration, demonstrating that they shortened the highly predictable rhyme resolutions. These results further understanding of the factors that affect spoken word duration, and demonstrate the myriad cues that children receive about linguistic structure from nursery rhymes.
... Però si concentrano su un solo tipo di metro poetico, il pentametro giambico. Esiste un numero importante di lavori sulla generazione di poesia a cominciare da paper di R.Tsur e P.Gérvas [15,16,17], che usa Case Based Reasoning (Ragionamento Basato su Esempi) che sembra indurre la migliore struttura del verso. Altri tentativi interessanti sono quelli di Toivanen et al. [18] che usa un approccio basato su corpora per generare poesia in finnico. ...
In questo lavoro presentiamo il lavoro in corso per la creazione della versione italiana di SPARSAR sistema creato per l'analisi e la visualizzazione del contenuto poetico-quindi, prosodico, retorico e semantico-di poesie inglesi a partire dalla poesia elisabettiana. Il lavoro di conversione ha attualmente raggiunto e completato un primo traguardo che permette al sistema di leggere attraverso la sintesi vocale disponibile su computer la poesia analizzata con sufficiente espressività e sono in fase di applicazione le componenti che sono responsabili per una manipolazione accurata del contorno intonativo. Descriveremo quindi quanto già funzionante e il modulo che si preoccupa di costruire il contorno intonativo sulla base della struttura creata dalla interazione tra fonologia, sintassi, semantica e pragmatica. 1. INTRODUZIONE In questo lavoro presentiamo le attività in corso per la creazione della versione italiana di SPARSAR-System for Poetry Automatic Rhythm and Style AnalyzeR (la cui prima presentazione è stata nel 2013[8])-sistema creato per l'analisi e la visualizzazione del contenuto poetico-quindi, prosodico, retorico e semantico-di poesie inglesi a partire dalla poesia elisabettiana[4]. Il lavoro di conversione ha attualmente raggiunto e completato un primo traguardo che permette al sistema di leggere attraverso la sintesi vocale disponibile su computer la poesia analizzata con sufficiente espressività e sono in fase di applicazione le componenti che sono responsabili per una manipolazione accurata del contorno intonativo[5]. La versione definitiva del sistema avrà come risultato un algoritmo dedicato a valutare la combinazione degli espedienti poetici e figure retoriche, nonché delle valenze semantiche e pragmatiche che possono convergere oppure no per creare un unico flusso di combinazioni senso-suono[7]. Descriveremo ora quanto già funzionante e il modulo che si preoccupa di costruire il contorno intonativo sulla base della struttura creata dalla interazione tra fonologia, sintassi, semantica e pragmatica. In particolare il sistema produce le seguenti analisi del testo di una poesia:-analisi morfologica e tagging grammaticale;-analisi sintattica a costituenti e a dipendenze;-analisi semantica a livello di parola e di enunciato per l'indicazione del "sentiment";-ricerca delle parole rare sulla base della liste di frequenze disponibili, quella chiamata WaCKy 1-450mila parole ricavata dal corpus PAISA' di 250M di tokens-confrontata con altre liste-tra cui quella di SUBTLEX 2 fatta di 500mila parole da 50M di testi, quella di ColFIS 3-173mila parole da un corpus di 3.5M di testi, quella di Buchmeier 4-75mila parole da un corpus di 5.5M di testi, per mostrare la variabilità legata alla tipologia dei testi che compongono il corpus di riferimento[2,3];-analisi fonologica che include la trascrizione fonetica, la separazione in sillabe, e l'assegnazione dell'accento di parola-traduzione del risultato dell'analisi precedente in due formati: un primo formato in ARPAbet e in IPA con l'aggiunta però delle informazioni prosodiche, separazione in sillabe e accento di parola; un secondo formato per la lettura da parte del sintetizzatore disponibile su computer Apple. Il primo formato serve per introdurre nel secondo formato parole che il sintetizzatore non sarebbe in grado di leggere correttamente-ne parlo in seguito.-traduzione nel formato SSML, il markup language utilizzato dalla maggior parte dei sintetizzatori vocali disponibili online, tra cui quello della Microsoft nell'ambiente chiamato Azure 5 , o quello di Polly 6 di Amazon.-costruzione del contorno intonativo e della struttura prosodica complessiva Abbiamo testato il sistema utilizzando poesie scritte da poeti a cavallo tra l'800 e il '900. La lingua italiana, soprattutto quella usata nella poesia dell'800 e dell'inizio del '900, da poeti come Foscolo, Carducci, Pascoli e altri utilizza figure retoriche e poetiche tipiche, in parte ereditate dai grandi poeti del '200 e del '300, Dante, Petrarca e tramandate a quelli del '400 e '500 come Ariosto. Le strutture di frase sono la sede per realizzare effetti essenziali a livello semantico che si 1 https://wacky.sslmit.unibo.it/ 2
... As R.Tsur [10] comments in his introduction to his book, iambic pentameter has to be treated as an abstract pattern and no strict boundary can be established. The majority of famous English poets of the past, while using iambic pentameter have introduced violations, which in some cases -as for Milton's Paradise Lost -constitute the majority of verse patterns. ...
We assume that poetic devices have an implicit goal: producing an overall sound scheme that will induce the reader to associate intended and expressed meaning to the sound of the poem. Sounds may be organized into categories and assigned presumed meaning as suggested by traditional literary studies. In my work, I have extracted automatically the sound grids of all the sonnets by William Shakespeare and have combined them with the themes expressed by their contents. In a first experiment I have computed lexically and semantically based sentiment analysis obtaining an 80% of agreement. In a second experiment sentiment analysis has been substituted by Appraisal Theory thus obtaining a more fine-grained interpretation which in some cases contradicts the first one. The computation for the second poet - regarded by many critics the best of last century - includes both vowels and consonants. In addition, it combines automatic semantically and lexically based sentiment analysis with sound grids. The results produce visual maps that clearly separate poems into three clusters: negative harmony, positive harmony and disharmony where the latter instantiates the need by the poet to encompass the opposites in a desperate attempt to reconcile them.
... This set of predictions comes down to learned expectations. Many researchers have contended that expectation plays a crucial role in aesthetic pleasures (Huron, 2008;Van de Cruys and Wagmans, 2011;Tsur, 2012). This theory is widely seen as foundational in regard to music, where knowledge about a work or genre (like Western classical music, for example) may generate pleasurable tension that is resolved when a sequence of notes or chords reaches its proper resolution (Huron, 2008). ...
Aesthetic experiences have the potential to promote learning and creativity by enhancing the ability to understand complexity and to integrate novel or disparate information. Offering a theoretical framework for understanding the cognitive benefits of aesthetic experiences, this paper argues they are the necessary outcome of human learning, in which natural objects or artworks are evaluated in a multi-dimensional preference space shaped by Bayesian prediction. In addition, it contends that the brain-states underlying aesthetic experiences harness configurations of the apex three transmodal neural systems—the default mode network, the central executive network, and the salience network—that may offer information-processing advantages by recruiting the brain’s high-power communication hubs, thus enhancing potential for learning gain.
... Pour une étude théorique et analytique plus détaillée de la poésie en perspective cognitive voir : Poetic Rhythm: Structure and Performance -An Empirical Study in Cognitive Poetics(Tsur, 2012). ...
This article proposes a contextualization of geocriticism studies within the framework of theoretical approaches on the abstraction process that take place in literary language. Methodologically contextualised within the frame of the studies on Cognitive Literary Theory the article argues that the study of emotions expression in landscape representations can help us to better understand the way in which human imagination works. In its analytical level, the study approaches the works Gisements de lu-mière (1998), and La Douleur des seuils (2002), by Amina Saïd (Tunis, 1953), in which the formalization of the landscape motivates a cognitive analysis of poetic language. Since literature has both axiological and biological values, this study explores the idea that emotions are involved in our abstract understanding of the world, while simultaneously considering a theoretical path for a Cognitive Aesthetics of Literature.
... Some works defend an approach based on speech flow and its step-by-step, unitby-unit examination, which implies a temporal construction, both in production and in reception (Mourgues, 1724;Tynianov, 1977;Golomb, 1979;Cornulier, 1977, Cornulier, 1982, Cornulier, 1995, Cornulier, 1997bAuer, Couper-Kuhlen, Müller, 1999;Cornulier, 2000, Cornulier 2003Tsur, 2008, Tsur, 2012Paterson, 2018). This means that reading time is a factor inherent in the construction of MEs and the coherence of speech. ...
This volume responds to the current interest in computational and statistical methods to describe and analyse metre, style, and poeticity, particularly insofar as they can open up new research perspectives in literature, linguistics, and literary history. The contributions are representative of the diversity of approaches, methods, and goals of a thriving research community. Although most papers focus on written poetry, including computer-generated poetry, the volume also features analyses of spoken poetry, narrative prose, and drama. The contributions employ a variety of methods and techniques ranging from motif analysis, network analysis, machine learning, and Natural Language Processing. The volume pays particular attention to annotation, one of the most basic practices in computational stylistics. This contribution to the growing, dynamic field of digital literary studies will be useful to both students and scholars looking for an overview of current trends, relevant methods, and possible results, at a crucial moment in the development of novel approaches, when one needs to keep in mind the qualitative, hermeneutical benefit made possible by such quantitative efforts.
... Some works defend an approach based on speech flow and its step-by-step, unitby-unit examination, which implies a temporal construction, both in production and in reception (Mourgues, 1724;Tynianov, 1977;Golomb, 1979;Cornulier, 1977, Cornulier, 1982, Cornulier, 1995, Cornulier, 1997bAuer, Couper-Kuhlen, Müller, 1999;Cornulier, 2000, Cornulier 2003Tsur, 2008, Tsur, 2012Paterson, 2018). This means that reading time is a factor inherent in the construction of MEs and the coherence of speech. ...
Within the framework of a study on the relationships between rhythm and meaning in French versified poetry, this chapter discusses the limitations of the most common approach: aligning syntactic and metrical structures. This approach, in theoretical works as well as in automated processing, focuses on enjambments, a notion that proves unsatisfactory in several respects. I suggest analyzing the metrical expressions themselves, considering their beginning, their end, and their internal consistency while also trying to integrate the processing time of successive metrical expressions and specific reader expectations, as well as the time periods and the individual poets considered.
... Sözgelimi, araştırmacıya göre düzgü bilişsel bir süreçtir; dolayısıyla insan bilişinde ve dilinde düzgünün rolünün tam olarak açıklanması için şiirde incelemesi gereken biçimsel ve bürünsel özellikler bulunmaktadır (Freeman, 2007(Freeman, , s. 1193. Benzer biçimde, dilsel araştırmalar şiirsel ölçü çözümlemelerinde düzgülü gruplamaları ayırt etmek için sesbilimsel vurgu kurallarını uygulamaktayken, Tsur şiirleştirme örüntüleri üzerine odaklanmaktadır (Tsur, 1998'den aktaran Tsur, 2017. Araştırmacının düzgü anlayışı düzgülemeyi dilde bir nesne olarak ele almayıp okuyucunun algılamasına konumlandırması bakımından bir devrim olarak kabul edilmektedir. ...
Bilişsel Şiirbilim alanı yazınsal çalışmaların bilişsel bilimler çerçevesinde özellikle de Bilişsel Psikoloji alanının katkısıyla içerdiği duygu yoğunluğu bakımından diğer türlerden farklılık gösteren şiirlerin dil yoluyla okuyuculara ulaşma biçimlerini incelemektedir. Bilişsel Şiirbilim çalışmaları her ne kadar Tsur (1992) tarafından okuyucu üzerindeki algısal etkilerin Bilişsel Psikoloji temelinde açıklanmasını ifade etse de, sonrasında alana ait çalışmalar Lakoff ve Johnson’ın (1980) Kavramsal Eğretileme Kuramı (Conceptual Metaphor Theory) ile Stockwell’in (2002) bilişsel dilbilim, bilişsel biçembilim ve Metin Dünyası Kuramı (Text World Theory) birlikteliğiyle oluşturduğu yaklaşımı içermektedir. Yeni bir çalışma alanı olarak şiirsel dilin ve biçimin bireye ait bilişsel süreçler yoluyla nasıl sınırlandırıldığını ve biçimlendirildiğini açıklamaya çalışan Tsur (1992, 2002) çerçevesinde yapılan bu çalışmada şiir yoluyla tetiklenen duygu etkileri ve sıklıklarını çözümlemek, bu etkiler ve sıkılıklarında tekçil-bütüncül ilişki açısından benzerlik/farklılık olup olmadığını belirlemek, elde edilen veriler doğrultusunda bilişsel bir işlemleme türü olarak duygu etkilerini Bilişsel Şiirbilim çerçevesinde tartışmak amaçlanmıştır. Bu amacı gerçekleştirmek için Nazım Hikmet Ran’ın Güz adlı şiiri veritabanı olarak seçilmiş, Plutchik (1980)’in Duygu Modeli temel alınarak 407 Türkçe anadili konuşucusu katılımcı üzerinde şiirdeki duygu tetikleyicisi olarak işlev gören düzeneğin tekçil dizeler mi yoksa bütüncül algılanış mı olduğu bilişsel bakış açısıyla sentezlenerek tartışılmış, şiirdeki duygu etkilerinin tekçil ve bütüncül açıdan bakışımsız bir ilişki içinde oldukları sonucuna ulaşılmıştır.
... On another note, regarding metrical lines, different typologies have been proposed (Aroui 2009;Dufter 2010;Fabb 1997;Fabb, Halle 2008;Lotz 1960;Tsur 1998). According to Aroui (2009), we need two criteria in order to distinguish and compare metrical lines between the world's languages: prosodic constituents and type of organization. ...
This paper studies the principal aspects of meter of three traditional Kakataibo chants (a Panoan group of Peruvian Amazonia). Regarding meter, Kakataibo chants exhibit patterns relevant for the cross-linguistic study of line and meter typology. I describe the Kakataibo system of versification as a quantitative meter that counts an exact number of moras and regulates the distribution of these by imposing grouping restrictions; also, it establishes weight differences between light, heavy and superheavy syllables, and vowel lengthening plays an important role for meter purposes. In addition, the average duration of lines tends to last less than three seconds and decreases progressively during performance.
... Surface structure is the text that can be read or heard. Emotion concepts as deep structure form a large part of the study of cognitive linguistics (see, e.g., Kövecses 1995Kövecses , 2006Tsur 2002Tsur , 2008bTsur , 2012Wierzbicka 1995Wierzbicka , 2009). However, Crystal excludes emotional or subjective interpretation from semantic meaning (2011, sc. ...
The poetry of Sappho is analysed via the method of cognitive poetics developed by Reuben Tsur. The analysis discovers fundamental levels of meanings and understandings of Sappho's works that have not hitherto been available to earlier students and practitioners of literary criticism, since the theory holds that poetry exploits cognitive processes which were originally evolved for non-aesthetic purposes and which so evolved under an aesthetic motivation. The paper illustrates and explicates the analytical rigour and the power of discovery delivered by the method.
... Although various studies have been conducted within the wider cognitive-stylistic literature which investigate how the visuospatial presentation of poetry affects the way that such poetry is read and processed (see in particular: Zwaan, 1991Zwaan, , 1993Zwaan, , 1994Tsur, 1998;Hanauer, 2001;Steinhauer and Friederici, 2001;Emmott et al., 2006;Brouwer et al., 2012;Koops van 't Jagt et al., 2014), the area has not yet been explored adequately within the cognitive-pragmatic framework of relevance theory Wilson, 1986, 1995;Wilson andSperber, 2004, 2012a). Consequently, this article explores the general cognitivepragmatic effects and potential communicational benefits of the tactical placement of line divisions from a relevancetheoretic perspective. ...
This article examines the potential cognitive-pragmatic effects of line divisions within poetic text from the perspective of relevance theory. The article posits that line divisions can function as perceptual inputs to pragmatic processing, which encourage readers to inferentially process certain elements of a given poetic text's linguistically encoded content in a more contextually exhaustive manner, than likely would have been the case had the text been arranged upon the page in a less visuospatially fragmented form. The article contends that such levels of processing may give rise to arrays of additional cognitive-pragmatic effects of a communicatively weak and for some readers poetic nature.
... Structures of emotion go with the structures of sounds, right down to tiny phonological diff erences. What have been called intuitions are explained here in frequences and other acoustic details, which present diff erent kinds of precategorial information (Tsur 2012a(Tsur , 2012b. Poetic conventions are shaped and constrained by the natural capacities and limitations of the human brain (Tsur 2017: 158). ...
This paper discusses some central problems that occur within cognitive versification studies. Derek Attridge’s Moving Words (2013) comments on Richard Cureton’s concept of temporalities. Attridge understands poetic rhythm as movement. He draws the conclusion that movement and repetition are, in principle, contradictory because, in a way, repetition looks backwards and stops the movement. This turns out to be a complicated statement, as repetition seems to be the only poetic device that is common in poetry all over the world. However, it may be possible to understand the relationship between movement and repetition with the help of Reuven Tsur’s concept of back-structuring. This shows how verse rhythm is spatialised as well as has the ability to move in time. This is possible because of gestalt borders that close the sequences. Additionally, Cureton’s fourth thematic temporality is useful to solve the conflict. Temporality is a complex reality, and poetic rhythm also has the ability to stand still.
... It contains works by psychologists like Oatley and Gibbs. Stockwell (2008) considers Reuven Tsur (1992Tsur ( , 1998Tsur ( , 2008a) the founder of cognitive poetics. Tsur originates the phrase cognitive poetics in his book Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics in 1992. ...
... As depicted in the last session, children have all the possibilities to be well nurtured (human emotion, imaginary, imagination etc.) through poetry. Tsur (2012) has once considered poetry as a « unity in complexity » from a linguistic perspective: « the words and their order in a verse line are constrained by the lexicon, the norms of figurative language, syntax, rhyme, rhetorical schemes and, of course, meter » (Tsur, 2012, p. 424). In the meantime, it seems that the mutual constraint among these « incompatible norms » in poetry could forge itself as an « elegant solution », or an artistic way out from the complexity. ...
In France, poetry teaching, especially as a didactic method is rarely established. For the most of the time, it is underestimated, overlooked, or even missing in government programs, teaching plannings, or daily activities. Faced with this situation, we therefore seized certain vital elements (poetry, reading, teachers etc.) during the whole poetry learning process, and attempted to ask how could the redefinition of poetry perform its role in establishing a more comprehensive environment for pupils from 5 to 8 years old. It is also at this moment that we decided to adopt the concept of « ecopoetry », we contructed our hypothesis of ecopoetry to show it in several round ways. This « ecopoetry » construction was settled to build a framework for the question guide during data collection. We therefore conducted nine interviews with three groups (each group comprises three pupils with distinguished reading levels) of pupils from GS to CE1 and two others with teachers from CP and CE1. There I analyzed the establishment of ecopoetry of each case, from which we have discovered their respective key elements in ecopoetry. Our case analysis concentrated on multiple interactions among poetry, self, linguistic elements etc. The results led to a rather elaborated concept of ecopoetry, which turned out to be an extended version of our hypothesis. We therefore have adopted the four axes borrowed from the non-official program (EDSUCOL) to systematically show how the concept of ecopoetry develops in an all-around way. The role of poetry and its effects in pupils in reading learning are thus clarified and enriched during the process.
... But Tom Barney (1990), without having heard of Tsur's work, found a workaround, proving its feasibility. Tsur (1998;) applied Barney's method to his comprehensive theory of poetic rhythm; later he published his first instrumental manipulation of performed enjambment according to these principles (Tsur 2000). A conception of "non-disambiguating intonation contours" had been proposed by Katherine Loesch (1965), attacked by Chatman (1966), with a rejoinder by Loesch (1966). ...
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 perceived subtleness of irony and forthrightness of expression. We received four incompatible combinations of relative subtleness and forthrightness in the two passages. Two of the combinations were logically reasonable (though resulting from opposite performances), and two were internally inconsistent. An analysis of these results revealed two sources of this discrepancy: enjambments can be performed in three different ways, and participants respond not to abstract enjambments, but to performed enjambments; and they act upon partly overlapping definitions of irony. Assuming different performances of the enjambment, both logically acceptable response patterns support our hypothesis. Yet, a large part of the responses in this study were incoherent to some extent. This highlights the difficulty in collecting subjective interpretations of complex aesthetic events. We discuss this methodological issue at length.
... • in the two final lines reduction of the numer of phrases and accents: H* L* L-L%, H* L-L% due to gradual increase in tempo (from 3.7 to 7.8 syll./sec.) • guided by decreasing the distance between the words in the notation until their final merging Summary • the first attempt at investigation of the relationship between notation of Polish modern poetry and its vocal performance by the author (see : Hejmej, 2005, Tsur, 2012 • the analyses of vocal performances of modern poetry have not gone beyond the traditional hearing-oriented research ...
Background (1) • it is very uncommon in literary studies to go beyond written texts and reach for vocal performances of literary works • relationship between liryc poetry and singing • most of the time the original vocal performances of the texts are unavailable • in the 20th century recitation of poetry was the subject of literary studies from time to time, but it was regarded as the art of declamation and independent from the poem • poems which were inseparably linked with their vocal performance were considered beyond the scope of literarary studies; the texts were analyzed separately from their vocal performance Background (2)
In this article, we focus on the association of sound and sense harmony in the collection of sonnets written by Shakespeare in the XVI° beginning of the XVII° century and propose a new four-dimensional representation to visualize them by means of the system called SPARSAR. To compute the degree of harmony and disharmony, we automatically extracted the sound grids of all the sonnets and combined them with the semantics and polarity expressed by their contents. We explain in detail the algorithm and show the representation of the whole collection of 154 sonnets and comment on them extensively. In a second experiment, we use data from the manual annotation of the sonnets for satire detection using the Appraisal Theory Framework, to gauge the system’s accuracy in matching these data with the output of the automatic algorithm for sound–sense harmony. The results obtained with a 94.6% accuracy confirm the obvious fact that the poet has to account for both sound and meaning in the choice of words.
This paper addresses the work of the Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker (1924–2021) with an interdisciplinary approach contextualised within Cognitive Poetics and Cognitive Literary Theory studies. The specific focus of this study is the voice and the meaning produced through the proposed notion of a ‘poetic spoken atmosphere’. The poetic spoken atmosphere is understood here not as the unique property of an audio-text but rather as an intersubjective phenomenon emerging at the intersection of the poetic language and a listener. This notion underlines the importance of voice and its effects in the dynamics of poetry reception in order to investigate sound patterns and meaning-making dynamics, approaching three specific processes – rhythm, expectation, and emotion. The general theoretical frame of this study is based on principles of both phenomenology and cognitive sciences. Likewise, the analysis of Mayröcker’s poems is based on her recordings, available on the Lyrikline platform of the Haus für Poesie Berlin, from which spectrograms were generated to complement the textual and acoustic analysis. The observations of this study address the vocal structures modulating what can be termed an ‘insideness’, which allows to analyze sound attributes such as duration, intensity, ubiquity, and disappearing. Recognising such attributes help us to understand the emotional level of poetic sounds, i. e. the relationship between feeling and meaning in listening, hypothesising that meaning is indeed felt . Finally, the paper offers a comparative perspective that suggests further research on the basis of the paper’s theoretical-analytical methodology, and it provides specific examples from several literary systems.
This study of “parallelism” in biblical Hebrew poetry has been stimulated by the recent monograph on biblical poetry by Grosser (2023). After an initial overview of the book, I summarize some of the main challenges that I encountered when trying to process the essential aspects of Grosser’s novel Gestalt-based approach. Next, from my literary-structural perspective I consider a larger selection of poetic passages as examples to illustrate the salient differences in our analytical procedures and results. This comparative survey will hopefully stimulate others to take up further cognitive and stylistic explorations of this important topic which, though very well-known and documented by past and present expositions, is not without its lingering ambiguities and points of controversy, which at times significantly affect technical terminology as well as Bible interpretation and translation.
For E. Grosser's response and my rejoinder, see at: https://www.academia.edu/124604522/Can_Parallelism_in_Biblical_Hebrew_Poetry_be_Unparalleled_A_Response_and_A_Rejoinder
This article is a response to Ernst Wendland’s article—also in this issue of Journal of Translation—which interacts with my cognitive approach to biblical Hebrew poetry, especially my recent monograph, Unparalleled Poetry (2023). In this article, I set my work within the broader context of biblical poetry studies and explain how it draws from literary and cognitive research to provide a robust framework for the concept of the poetic line—a contribution to not only biblical studies, but also broader poetry studies. The poetic line gets to the heart of the nature of poetry: the line is central to not just poetic structure (up to the level of the whole poem), but also poetry’s potential for rhythm and effects and construction of meaning. My view of the centrality of the line affects how I address various issues related to parallelism. I close by discussing the role and limits of method in regard to both poetic lineation and reading of poems.
The concept of 'rhythm' is common in descriptions of music, poetry, sculpture and painting. Is 'rhythm' the same phenomenon in all these cases, or is the word sometimes used metaphorically? We will try to answer that question, Lena Hopsch from the perspective of producing art and Eva Lilja from the perspective of academic reception analysis. Lena Hopsch exemplifies with a sculpture by the constructivist sculptor Naum Gabo (1890-1977), Eva Lilja analyses a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-). We regard 'rhythm' as an experience of the senses which determines the production as well as the perception of an art work. In our analysis we also change perspective, Eva Lilja discusses spatiality in poetry and Lena Hopsch discusses the experience of a sculpture as an experience in time as well as in space. Rhythms act in space as well as in time. We think that the experience of being a body in a room is basic for any apprehension of rhythm and that the basic rhythmical figure is the dancing body. Taking this as a starting point, we will argue that 'rhythm' is an adequate and not a metaphoric category in all the art forms mentioned above. Cognitive theory points out how bodily experience shapes abstract notions, and we believe that this is correct. 1 A dancing body moves in time as well as in space. Performing a dance may be regarded as the prototype of rhythm. The evident example here is the 'mousiké' of ancient Greece-an art form where dance, music and poetry were performed simultaneously. The ancient choir danced while performing. 2 In Antiquity, the beat was provided by tapping the foot while reciting poetry. 3 Rhythm functions multimodally-in the rhythmical experience you have to combine different types of perception, like visuality and audibility. We presuppose that seeing and hearing mediate rhythm, but that feeling probably is the main perception type, speaking of rhythm. This follows from our focus on the rhythm of the dancing body. However, the sense of feeling is more complicated and less investigated than the other four ones, and more than that-it is lacking adequate terminology. 'Feeling' signifies the sum of several types of perception. We have to divide it in, at least, two kinds, tactility and the haptic sense. The basic experience of rhythm probably takes place by help of the kinesthetic sense ('proprioception'), a bodily awareness situated in the memory of the muscles, which makes it possible to determine the position of your limbs even when you close your eyes. We are using our kinesthetic sense when we are dancing, bicycling or walking.
Call for Papers
The 1st International Conference on Lyric Theory and Comparative Poetics intends to bring together research that is currently being carried out in the field of poetry from a theoretical and comparative perspective. The interdisciplinary, multicultural, and inclusive inclination that characterises contemporary poetological investigations has led to a diversity of theoretical and analytical approximations with which poetry is approached and whose attention is inevitably fruitful. This conference aims to bring together and debate national and international research about poetry on its theoretical and methodological levels, while providing space for practical and sociological issues concerning the production, translation, circulation and teaching of poetry at present. The conference will include the following thematic threads, although it is not limited to these nor necessarily restricted to the organisation described here.
This paper presents a perception study investigating the perceptual relevance of lengthening at the end of lines with enjambment in poem recitations. An enjambment occurs when the end of a line disrupts a syntactic unit. In recitation, a speaker has different possibilities to realize this conflict between syntactic coherence on the one hand, and versification on the other. In a previous study, lengthening of the verse-final segment was found in lines both with and without enjambment. In the present study, we investigated whether this lengthening effect is perceptually meaningful in the prediction of line breaks. We re-synthesized the original recitation and manipulated the verse-final segments' duration. While predicting line breaks seemed to be an overall difficult task for listeners, we found that verse-final lengthening increases the success rate and was thus perceived by listeners as a prosodic cue to versification, even when it occurred within syntactic constituents.
Poetry is regarded the highest linguistic form of expression of a language and its culture, for this reason it is and will always constitute fundamental target of linguistic studies besides literary criticism. As far as computational studies are concerned, poetry always represents a difficult task to cope with, the more so today with the advancement of AI and the linguistic models it is based on. For instance. ChatGPT, is it capable to analyze any poem and its poetic devices? As for today it doesn't seem so. We tested it with some English poems to discover that already in the basic tasks it has problems. Although it is able to produce a good grapheme to phoneme translation-except for homographs not homophones-and to separate words in syllables, it doesn't assign correctly word stress. In this way the basic elements for a correct scansion are lacking and both rhythm and rhyme scheme will be ignored. In addition it will be impossible to create an intonational contour with an appropriate sentence stress. In fact ChatGPT has no TTS (text to speech) module to read a text aloud nor is it able to produce a complete SSML transcription of a poem. Complex tasks are not part of the abilities of any DNNs driven system. Asking for instance to create a poem where there are enjambments and marked syntactic structures-subject is postponed to its modifier-, no enjambment is produced and only some fronting has appeared but with different values. In fact, computational analysis of poetry is a complex task and has been better coped with following a rule based symbolic approach starting from the '80s. At the time of my PhD thesis in Melbourne, middle '70s, poetry figured only sporadically in quantitative analyses-computational approaches didn't exist yet. This was due to the fact that the object of "stylistics", reference topic, only dealt with narratives. My thesis and the book that ensued-followed by a number of papers on journals-used the computer to study linguistic aspects in the overall poetic work of Francis Webb which were relevant to assess the impact of mental illness. The approach was a mixture of computational and quantitative and the program was written in Fortran. They were mainly three: the quantity of words starting with letter Q compared with W.B. Yeats; the quantity of words containing the stem LIGHT and DARK where in both cases we used morphological decomposition; and finally the quantity of personal pronouns of first second and third person (plural in this case) distributed in the different temporal phases into which the poetic work could be subdivided (6 phases) 1. The new updated version of the book is just coming out and contains new updated analyses both quantitative and computational. The poet Francis Webb died in a psychiatric hospital in middle '70s shortly before my arrival in Melbourne. Here below is the picture of the cover of the book with a highly inspiring drawing by a psychiatric patient from Trieste hospital.
Based on current research on the triad of language, literature, and emotion in cognitive linguistics, (neuro-)psychology, and cognitive poetics and stylistics, the present chapter sheds light on specific stylistic strategies and their potential emotive qualities. The chapter focuses on how stylistic devices such as patterns of rhythm and sound in literature are functionalized to evoke emotional responses in readers. It thus deals only indirectly with questions of (mimetic) representations of emotion and emotionality in literature. The chapter outlines the theoretical discussion and current state of debate in the interdisciplinary field of emotion research and stylistics and argues for a stronger consideration of mood as an emotive reader response in its own right. As point of departure for an analytical framework, it takes up a gestalt theoretical framework of poetic rhythm. Drawing on a conceptualization of rhythm as a perceptional category rather than a property of a text as well as an embodied cognition model of reader engagement in literature, the chapter proposes a phonostylistic approach. This means to understand a written text as a potential phonotext whose stylistic features of rhythm, accentuation, sound and tone can be seen as crucial with regard to the textual evocation of emotive reader responses.
This work highlights the translation strategies motivated by the matrices of the national poetic mappings of the world in the original and recipient cultures. Its purpose lies in displaying the immediate connection between the patterns of translators’ reframing the poetic source images and the conceptual structure of prototype gestalts that have taken root in the source and target poetic traditions. The methodological instrument of revealing and describing this link has been found in the conceptual analysis of images within the framework of the English and Ukrainian poetic models of the world and in the application of the gestaltist laws of Prägnanz and Closure that appear to be efficient in elucidating the motivation of translatorial decisions in case a complex source image presents a considerable translation problem due to its inviolable links with specific conceptual schemas ingrained in the target poetic worldview. The paper delineates the cognitive underpinnings of translators’ decisions in the situations of limited translatability of the source-personified images conditioned by their culture-bound gender characteristics. Although the research is performed on the basis of two concrete poetic worldview systems, it investigates universal cognitive regularities of literary translation as gestalt principles state the general rules of human perception.
Human rights-, gender-and environmental-activists struggle hard to get their messages heard. This paper discusses communicative strategies and the establishing of norms, in general, and the impact of repetitions, in particular. It contributes to previous research on meaning-making and discusses how/what patterns of repetition are of central importance when activists are resisting certain discourses by way of negotiating and enhancing different norms. Overall, we use linguistic theories on repetitions and suggest different ways of repeating words, images or sounds in conversations and media that might transform the boundaries and content of contemporary discourses. This paper displays four different patterns of repetition in the nexus between the symbolic and the material-that can be employed in order to establish, maintain or resist certain political truths. In this paper, we consider the repetition of representations, with the aim of accomplishing a transformation of values, to be a powerful practice of dissent and linguistic activism. Hereby, this paper answers to the call of a number of leading critical sociologists who urge us to place the future well-being of society at the centre of our current sociological research.
El presente trabajo propone una nueva perspectiva biopoética en los estudios cognitivos del texto "La Deshumanización del Arte" (1925) del filósofo modernista español José Ortega y Gasset. Dentro de este espacio temporal hubo una gran influencia en el pensamiento mundial sobre los conceptos de ARTE, CULTURA, HUMANO, PROGRESO. Las referencias directas las encontramos en autores estadounidenses como T.S. Eliot y en autores españoles, especialmente del Grupo Poético de 1927, e indirectamente en los trabajos artísticos.
This project proposes a new method in the cognitive analysis of the concept HUMAN as it is embodied in the thoughts of the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, and lexicalized in his essay "the dehumanization of art". The HUMAN element is here understood through cognitive mappings of metaphorical and metonymic projections. We will try to show the importance of the concept DEHUMANIZATION and its application to the notion of social evolution in the 21st century.
To this point few empirical studies have examined the reactions of students when translated poems are used in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) literature classrooms. In a previous study (see Chesnokova et al., 2017), we noticed that opting for translations comes with a price, and reactions will vary. In this chapter, we offer a detailed line-by-line analysis of Poe’s ‘The Lake’ translated into three different languages so as to check whether these differences may be attributed to the translators’ choices. In this line versions from renowned translators are selected and compared with the original poem by means of stylistic analysis. The results of this comparison are then checked against reactions to the texts by 500 students of Language and Literature obtained in a previous study. This chapter argues that each translation does indeed create a singular context that may account for the differences. We conclude that teachers of literature should be made aware that the unique context the translators’ stylistic options create may strongly impact upon students’ reading experiences.
This article adopts a relevance-theoretic approach to the study of line divisions in nonmetrical free verse poetry. The article argues that, when positioned at particular points within a poetic text's constituent structure, line divisions can take on procedural-like qualities, in that they perceptually highlight particular elements of the text's linguistically encoded material, thus steering the inferential interpretation process in particular directions. The article also argues that the procedural-like qualities of line divisions can interact with relevance-driven inference, and with the generic convention for interpreting poetic texts in a non-spontaneous fashion, to produce arrays of cognitive effects, which likely would not have been derived had the text been arranged in a less visuospatially segmented manner. Furthermore, the article suggests that the conceptual material relating to these effects may map back onto and adjust the text's lexically encoded content, affecting how particular elements of this content are narrowed and/or broadened, and thus the nature of the resulting ad hoc concepts.
«Voz y atmósferas poéticas en perspectiva cognitiva».
Conferencia impartida en el Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Culturali Comparati, de la Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, por invitación del Dr. Alessandro Mistrorigo. 5.11.2021
This paper uses a textual decision at Iliad 9.394 to argue for irregularity as a functional and meaningful principle in the constitution of the Homeric text. In contrast to almost all recent major editions, I argue that the ‘irregular’ MSS γαμέσσεται should be preferred to the Aristarchaean conjecture γε μάσσεται. Aristarchus’ widely adopted emendation, I suggest, is the product of a drive towards standardization that is still operative in Homeric text-critical practice. This paper opposes that standardization with the evidence of ancient, perhaps pre-Alexandrian, responses to Iliad 9.394, in which the ‘irregularity’ of γαμέσσεται is embraced as an interpretive opportunity. The formal disruptions of γαμέσσεται, I propose, can be understood by locating them both within the immediate context of Iliad 9 and within the wider thematics of irregularity that mark the character of Achilles. This paper thus attempts to reframe our approach to the role of irregularity in the Iliad as an integral feature of meaning rather than grounds for suspecting the integrity of the text.
Bibliography on selected subjects of Cultural Studies.
This chapter provides an overview of the book by laying out the context and conceptual justification for the study of the lingual- and vocal-based presence of Chinese stars. It first delineates a picture of Chinese star culture marked by multiple flows of language, accent, and voice across boundaries nowadays, revealing the need to seek a new genealogy of understanding Chinese stars. It is followed by the review of literature of the star power in translingual filmmaking, proving the underexplored dimension of “the aural” in star studies and in transnational Chinese cinema studies. The result, thus, justifies the effort to advance a “linguaphonic” model, for which I suggest a tripartite framework that outlines the “phonic” shifts of Chinese icons in Anglophone media space, Sinophone cinematic space, and digital multimedia space on interphonic, intraphonic, and extraphonic levels. This introduction closes with a summary of the chapters.
The term ‘caesura’ (or ‘pause’) has featured in discussion of English iambic pentameter for four centuries, and yet it still lacks what the Latin hexameter or the French alexandrine have: a definition of the term that might be usefully applied in stylistic description. Despite the temptation to dismiss it as a prosodic chimera or a mere epiphenomenon of syntax, this article will investigate a rough consensus that emerged amongst 18th-century theorists and practitioners about the bisecting caesura as both a normative element of versification and an aesthetic instrument, and attempt to formalize that consensus into a taxonomy based on linguistic features that will allow the caesura to function as a feature of stylistic description and analysis, not just for the heroic couplet but for the pentameter more generally, in terms of three independent and objectively definable properties that I term ‘balance’, ‘juncture’ and ‘integration’.
Temperatura voz is Mariano Peyrou’s fifth poetry book. Born in Buenos Aires in 1971, he has been living in Madrid since he was 5 years old. This book of his is a very particular one within his trajectory. According to some critics, it was written based on an idea of poetic language related to dodecaphonic music and through a combinatorial model. Thanks to the study of some recordings made for Phonodia project where is possible to listen to the poet’s voice reading aloud, this essay focuses on the physical voice, on the phoné, the preverbal matter of language, considering it as the sound matrix for the particular Peyrou’s poetic writing. Through the analysis of the acoustic signal realised with PRAAT, the essay also shows how the voice of the poet who reads aloud his texts brings to the surface the conflict that occurs between metric and syntactic series. The way in which his voice solves this poetic language specific conflict provides precious information about his writing.
La Poética cognitiva, surgida en el ámbito de los estudios neurocientíficos, desde sus comienzos se ha venido ocupando de cuestiones que hasta ese momento habían quedado limitadas a la poética de corte tradicional en el seno de la teoría de la literatura. Por ello, los planteamientos (y los resultados) que ofrece respecto de estas cuestiones han supuesto un giro copernicano en los estudios literarios, marcando un cambio de paradigma en el estudio de la creatividad, la relación entre imagen mental y construcción de enunciados de carácter estético-literarios (es decir, la enunciación de las imágenes mentales procedentes de las experiencias existenciales y transformadas en objeto estético) o las relaciones entre ritmo y significación, entre otras.. Esta aportación al Congreso Internacional “El isomorfismo de los saberes” tiene como finalidad plantear y ejemplificar estas relaciones entre imagen y enunciado (por una parte), y entre ritmo y significación (por otra), buscando en la poesía imaginista (nacida en las vanguardias, aunque en este caso tomaremos los ejemplos de la neovanguardia española y francesa) la materialización de estos principios teóricos procedentes de la Poética cognitiva, a la que uniré propuestas de otras vertientes de la Ciencia cognitiva (antropología o lingüística) hasta configurar una perspectiva metodológica transdisciplinar. Con ello se pretende dotar de un evidente fundamento científico a nuestro estudio, para alcanzar unas conclusiones justificadas y verosímiles.
The present paper focuses on the philological reconstruction and account of Fernando Pessoa’s scansion of one verse from Os Lusíadas, as presented in some unpublished draft notes for his projected Treaty of Prosody and Poetics. To begin with, Pessoa’s analysis of rhythmic pauses is introduced. Secondly, Robert Bridges’ «stressunits » are presented, which constituted the main inspiration for Pessoa’s scansion. Furthermore, a brief interpretation in terms of the generative theory of meter is put forward, which underscores the analogies and differences between the two linguistic traditions Pessoa worked with. Last but not least, the implications of Pessoa’s scansion for phrasing in Camões’ verse are also taken into account. A critical transcription of Pessoa’ s analysis on Camões is included in the Annex.
Auch unter den einflussreichsten Erben des Strukturalismus besteht die Frage bzw. der Wunsch nach Wissenschaftlichkeit in der Literaturwissenschaft fort. Zwar unterscheiden sich die einzelnen Antworten auf diese Frage etwas nach ihrem nationalen Kontext.¹ Verglichen mit der deutschen steht die anglo-amerikanische Tradition der Idee einer Literaturwissenschaft besonders skeptisch gegenüber (vgl. Müller-Sievers 2015, 1). Dennoch entwickeln sich strukturalistische und szientistische Paradigmen, wenn auch unterschiedlich ausgeprägt, international und im Dialog miteinander, wie im Folgenden deutlich wird.
The series Biblioteca di Rassegna Iberistica publishes monographs and collections of high scientific rigor essays regarding linguistic and cultural areas of Spanish, Spanish-American, Luso-Brazilian and Catalan. It is bound to present publications issued from research activities of Ca’ Foscari University and foreign and italian institutions and researchers’ publications. It aims to be a privileged location to discuss about research, instruments of our subjects according to innovative theorical and historical perspectives. A summary and interdisciplinary project, publishes works about the whole angles of Iberic and Ibero-American culture.
Cognitive literary criticism engages the contemporary psychology and neuroscience of reading, consciousness, imagery, social behavior, decision making, empathy, and perception in order to gain new insight on literature and creativity. Recent models of cognition, emotion and behavior have begun to show the ways in which classical notions of dualism and literary notions of interiority poorly represent human experience and the representation of that experience in literature and the arts. Moving systematically through areas of critical interest, from metaphor to narrative, empathy, imagery, and reading itself, this chapter explores some of the potential of cognitive approaches.
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