Emotion and Closure in the Sound Expressiveness of Quatrains from Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

The sound of the language in a literary text is often thought to contribute to its meaning. We hypothesize that this is due not to fixed or universal phoneme properties, as theories of phonetic symbolism have supposed, but to the use of local phonetic contrasts to elicit meaning. Writers may set an overall range of phonetic tones that are distinctive to a particular text and then introduce significant variations to achieve local effects. In the present study, an analysis of phoneme distributions developed by Miall (2001) and an approach to phonetic symbolism developed by Whissell (1999, 2000a, 2000b) were applied to a Katherine Mansfield short story. Readers' responses to the story were obtained using Semantic Differential ratings. The findings show the influence of phonetic patterns consistent with the hypothesis that phonemic contrasts elicit local changes in feeling tone. The effects of phonetic symbolism, while evident, were much less pronounced.

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Effects of Local Phonetic Contrasts in Readers' Responses to a Short Story

Miall

Kuiken

2002

Emotion Conveyed by Sound in the Poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Whissell¹

2002

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The use of sound was studied in several of Tennyson's shorter and better-known poems (e.g., Break, Break, Break and Ulysses) and in In Memoriam A. H. H. Poems were broken down into their component phonemes which were then classified in terms of their emotional character. The emotional character of sounds preferentially employed in each of the shorter poems matched the emotional theme of the poem (e.g., sounds employed in Airy Fairy Lilian and Lady of Shallot were most pleasant, those in Crossing the Bar were least pleasant). The emotional character of sounds preferentially employed in the final segments of In Memoriam revealed an underlying sadness to the poem's close belied by Tennyson's own interpretation of it. Analyses of In Memoriam also highlighted the elegy's frequent transitions from grief to hope and back again. It is concluded that Tennyson used sound (both consciously and unconsciously) to amplify the effects of his poetry.

Poetic Emotion and Poetic Style: The 100 Poems Most Frequently Included in Anthologies and the Work of Emily Dickinson

Whissell

2004

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The 100 most frequently anthologized English poems and the work of Emily Dickinson were analyzed empirically in terms of emotion, sound, and style. Results for the 100 poems indicated that poetry was significantly more Pleasant, less Active, more highly Imaged, and in several ways more complex than normal everyday English. In terms of sounds, the 100 poems included significantly more Sad, Passive, Soft, and Pleasant sounds and fewer Active and Nasty sounds than everyday English. Because of relationships between measures, seven factors were sufficient to explain most of the differences among poems. The 100 most frequently anthologized poems are ranked individually in terms of these factors. The poems of Emily Dickinson were significantly less Pleasant, less Active, and more Negative, though containing more Active and Nasty sounds. 55 Ó 2004, Baywood Publishing Co., Inc.