Rhyme and Cognitive Poetics

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 165.190.89.176 on Wed, 08 Jul 2015 00:55:37 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Abstract 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 frequently discuss rhymes impressionistically, in sporadic, ad hoc semantic analyses, and rely on readers to work out how these account for a poem's perceived affect(s). At other times critics ground their arguments in intertextuality, recasting rhyme as an enigma displaced from one text to another. Here I attempt to uncover the sources of possible affects of rhyme, suggesting critical tools for addressing it in a meaningful way in the hope of systematically relating its affects to its structure. Speech sounds are abstract categories, from which rich precategorical sensory information is typically stripped away. Nevertheless, some of this information does reach the cognitive system, reverberating briefly in short-term memory and facilitating, by way of certain cognitive tasks, the processing of verbal material. Rhyme exploits and enhances this sensory information. There is some experimental evidence that memory traces of two words that appear consecutively, that is, spread out in time, may be fused and perceived as if they were simultaneously present. Basing some of my findings on adaptations of gestalt psychology, I suggest that similar processes may occur in the interaction between phonetic categories and the underlying acoustic information, enhancing them or toning them down. Further, I consider the possible interaction of semantic or thematic features with acoustic information underlying speech sounds, as well as some conditions that maximize our tendency to respond to groups of individual stimuli as unified "percepts," which may account for the perceived qualities regularly associated with certain rhyme patterns, and I examine the relatively rare dactylic rhyme in an attempt to account for some contradictions regularly ascribed to it. PoeticsToday 17:1 (Spring 1996). Copyright ? 1996 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. CCC 0333-5372/95/$2.50. This content downloaded from 165.190.89.176 on Wed, 08 Jul 2015 00:55:37 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Poetics Today 17:1One of the most fascinating things that can happen to a researcher is to discover that his pieces of research, originally independent from one another, have begun to cohere into a field of research. My own work, which be...

Blending as a theoretical tool for poetic analysis

“…Even though Blending Theory has been taken as the theoretical basis of the methodology proposed here, we have incorporated some aspects of many other cognitive linguistic theories which we expect will illuminate the analysis of the poem; some of these theories have already been pointed out in the course of the articlesuch as Lakoff & Johnson's (1980), Marks's (1990), Tsur's (1997), Sweetser's (1990) and Ruiz de Mendoza's (1998, 2000) among others. 12 The present Integrational Method has been designed mainly for didactic purposes as a practical tool for both poetry students and scholars.…”

“…253-250, andespecially M. Freeman in Semino &Culpeper (2002, pp. 23-47) should be considered, as well as the role of the poem's sound structure in the meaning construction process (Tsur, 1997).…”

“…Attention also should be paid to the formal (i.e. sensory) disposition of the poem, taking into account in which way the poematic structure -particularly stanzas, rhythm and rhyme (Tsur, 1997) -contributes to or disturbs the cognitive generation of coherent mental spaces. The text below briefly illustrates how the mental space dynamics analysis can be accomplished.…”

A cognitive approach to alliteration and conceptualization in medieval English literature

“…The alliterative pattern being created is schematic: it primes the brain to notice repeated sounds and to hold them together with other like sounds, to chunk the discourse across multiple syntactic segments. As Tsur (1996: 59) argues, ‘sound patterns such as rhyme and alliteration not only “exploit” the working of the auditory short-term memory but actually enhance it’. Tsur is most interested in rhyme, and the way in which it ‘reverberates in echoic memory’ (1996: 74), but alliteration can be seen as a similar feature of ‘phonic coding’, one that contributes to coherence and counterpoint, even beyond the level of the line.…”

“…In turn, the interpreter of poetry, whether aural or scribal, recruits different interpretive and synthesizing capacities during sense making, with the result that the processing of poetic schemas and constructions must be distinctive – less strictly linear, more acoustically driven, and reliant on the comprehension of more complex patterning. Moreover, there is wide critical acknowledgement that gaps among meaning units can be larger in poetic texts; form cannot properly be separated from content; ‘poetic licence’ – an expectation of or tolerance for the flouting of grammatical and semantic rules – is contextually constructed and embedded in the interpretive contract; and the brain responds to the overlapping and interaction of the connections created by rhythm, rhyme, assonance, alliteration and other forms of sound patterning, in conjunction with semantic elements in poetry, in ways that must differ from the cognitive processing of prose (see Tsur 1996: 59). In turn, modifications to conventionalized constructions and chunking must arise from the expectations and realities of the poetic context.…”