What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive?

Tsur, Reuven

doi:10.1215/9780822378365

Cited by 56 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Such findings inspired literature scientists and psychologists to compare the phonetic content of poems of opposite general affective meaning . While some of these studies indicated that, for example, plosives appear more often in positive or happy poems, whereas nasals appear rather in sad contexts (Wiseman and van Peer, 2003; Albers, 2008; Auracher et al, 2011), other studies found contradictory evidence, for example, that plosives reflect negative characteristics (Fónagy, 1961; Whissell, 1999, 2000), or that nasal vowels represent beauty (Tsur, 1992). A general problem of these studies is that they were merely investigating the frequency of occurrence of the phonemes of interest, which could be misleading due to specifics of phoneme distributions in the poetic language mode.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Relation between the General Affective Meaning and the Basic Sublexical, Lexical, and Inter-lexical Features of Poetic Texts—A Case Study Using 57 Poems of H. M. Enzensberger

et al. 2017

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The literary genre of poetry is inherently related to the expression and elicitation of emotion via both content and form. To explore the nature of this affective impact at an extremely basic textual level, we collected ratings on eight different general affective meaning scales—valence, arousal, friendliness, sadness, spitefulness, poeticity, onomatopoeia, and liking—for 57 German poems (“die verteidigung der wölfe”) which the contemporary author H. M. Enzensberger had labeled as either “friendly,” “sad,” or “spiteful.” Following Jakobson's (1960) view on the vivid interplay of hierarchical text levels, we used multiple regression analyses to explore the specific influences of affective features from three different text levels (sublexical, lexical, and inter-lexical) on the perceived general affective meaning of the poems using three types of predictors: (1) Lexical predictor variables capturing the mean valence and arousal potential of words; (2) Inter-lexical predictors quantifying peaks, ranges, and dynamic changes within the lexical affective content; (3) Sublexical measures of basic affective tone according to sound-meaning correspondences at the sublexical level (see Aryani et al., 2016). We find the lexical predictors to account for a major amount of up to 50% of the variance in affective ratings. Moreover, inter-lexical and sublexical predictors account for a large portion of additional variance in the perceived general affective meaning. Together, the affective properties of all used textual features account for 43–70% of the variance in the affective ratings and still for 23–48% of the variance in the more abstract aesthetic ratings. In sum, our approach represents a novel method that successfully relates a prominent part of variance in perceived general affective meaning in this corpus of German poems to quantitative estimates of affective properties of textual components at the sublexical, lexical, and inter-lexical level.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Relation between the General Affective Meaning and the Basic Sublexical, Lexical, and Inter-lexical Features of Poetic Texts—A Case Study Using 57 Poems of H. M. Enzensberger

et al. 2017

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Poetic discourse has always attracted attention of linguists all over the world. Among the works dealing with the analysis of the nature of a poetic discourse and its linguistic peculiarities, it is worth mentioning those by Van Dijk (1979), Hoffstaedter (1987), Tsur (1992), Hanauer (1997), Dixon, Bortolussi, Twilley and Leung (1993), Tillmann and Dowling (2007), Stockwell (2007), Koepsell and Spoerhase (2008), Walsh (2010) and others.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lyrical I in Poetic Discourse of Carl Sandburg: A Linguo-Cognitive Approach

Babych¹,

Nedainova²

2020

IJEL

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The article deals with the linguo-cognitive analysis of the expression of the lyrical I in the poetic discourse of the prominent representative of the epoch of American modernism—Carl Sandburg. The lyrical I is understood as a poet’s imagery in which the image of a lyrical hero and the image of the author are united in a syncretic way and which represents a three-fold linguo-cognitive construct that incorporates a conceptual, pragmatic and verbal embodiments. Based on the analysis made in the research, the authors arrived at the conclusion that Carl Sandburg’s lyrical I describes a man of labor, depicts a difficult life of a man in an industrial city, shows the author’s appeal in support of a man’s fighting for his rights, for peace and freedom. In the poetic discourse of Carl Sandburg, the lyrical I is represented with the help of an urban figurativeness, a newspaper style of the language, a perfect skill of use of a blank verse resembling a song folklore, and a wide use of local expressions and dialectal words, colloquial language and prosaisms.

show abstract

“…The research in this article has its roots in cognitive psychology. It examines two branches of Tsur's cognitive poetics theory (sound symbolism and Gestalt closure: Tsur, 1992;Tsur, 1997;Tsur, Glickson, & Goldblatt, www.tau.ac.il/ -tsurxx/AbsorbLecture.html) and applies them to an analysis of Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These sounds or phonemes are an important part of the language process-one of the "many levels of significants and signifiés" (Tsur, 1997, p. 2) which influence both our reception of language and our creative efforts with it. The natural expressiveness of sounds can be traced to the manner of their production and to the physical characteristics of the resultant sound stimulus (Tsur, 1992). Expressiveness also gains impact from the overlap of sound-productive mechanisms in the human body with emotion-expressive mechanisms (Whissell, 1999(Whissell, , 2000.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Essentic forms could also govern the way in which a dancer moves his hands, or the words and sounds a poet chooses for a particular line of poetry. Tsur's (1992) claim for the expressiveness of sounds and Clynes' (1980) for the expressiveness of patterns both have their roots in nature-based rather than nurture-based processes. Tsur and Clynes assume that phonemes or patterns are able to communicate emotional information largely because human beings are innately preprogrammed to interpret them in certain ways.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

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

Whissell

2000

Empirical Studies of the Arts

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article follows two branches of Tsur's cognitive poetic theory to their logical conclusion and applies them to Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam where they are fully validated. The first branch emphasizes the expressiveness of speech sounds (phonemes) and the second branch the importance of the Gestalt principle of closure to poetry. Rubaiyat were phonetically transcribed and their phonemes were then categorized in terms of emotional character. The closural device of a return to baseline described the preferential use of active phonemes in the rubaiyat while the closural allusion of definitive termination described the preferential use of pleasant phonemes. Clynes' concept of the essentic form for grief was used to explain the rise and fall of preferential activation in the first three lines of each quatrain. The emotional picture drawn of the rubaiyat on the basis of these procedures was one of fatalism or emotional resignation. General patterns and individual examples are discussed.

show abstract

What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive?

Cited by 56 publications

References 0 publications

On the Relation between the General Affective Meaning and the Basic Sublexical, Lexical, and Inter-lexical Features of Poetic Texts—A Case Study Using 57 Poems of H. M. Enzensberger

On the Relation between the General Affective Meaning and the Basic Sublexical, Lexical, and Inter-lexical Features of Poetic Texts—A Case Study Using 57 Poems of H. M. Enzensberger

Lyrical I in Poetic Discourse of Carl Sandburg: A Linguo-Cognitive Approach

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

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About