Abstract
In this chapter we are concerned with cognitive models that may motivate emotive and affective reactions in poetry reading which are responsible of aesthetic pleasure. To experiment and verify our approach, we chose the collection of sonnets Shakespeare wrote toward the end of his life. We look into current cognitive theories related to work of art and in particular to literary work, and we fix, as our target, all linguistic items that cause surprise or are unexpected formal expressions. From this we move onto linguistic theories and analyze the import of noncanonical syntactic structures, displacements, and discontinuities that contribute novelty and unpredictability as applied to a language like English which however did undergo substantial changes in its history. At this point we move onto Elizabethan times – the sixteenth century – when Early Modern English substituted Middle English and marked the entry in Modern English. Here we delve into the sonnets and trace all rhetorical and poetic devices used by Shakespeare to make every sonnet a surprise. We then compute thanks to SPARSAR – our system for poetry analysis and reading – different types of complexity measures that are then used to gauge the validity of the choice of what can be regarded as most “popular” sonnets, a list of 35 sonnets. This is confirmed by an accuracy of 89%. Eventually we produce an accurate reading of the popular sonnets using the TTS of Microsoft Speech Synthesis: the analysis of SPARSAR, represented in ssml code, takes care of all changes in pronunciation required by poetic constraints and Early Modern English.
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Notes
- 1.
“Experimental data concerning esthetic pleasure and appreciation are usually explained on the basis of two different theories that seem to contradict each other. The first theory argues that liking and esthetic pleasure are a function of the interpreters’ processing dynamics, in particular of the fluency and ease of these processes. Because fluency is associated with progress toward a successful recognition of stimuli, it is positively marked and people very often draw on their subjective experience to make evaluative judgments … The second theory concerning appreciation argues that liking or preference for a stimulus is based upon the arousal potential of that stimulus, that is, how much activation the stimulus produces. The arousal potential is determined by properties such as novelty, incongruity, unpredictability, and surprisingness. On the basis of the principle of habituation (a universal property of nervous tissue), repeated presentations of a given stimulus are accompanied by decreases in physiological reactivity to the stimulus ....”
- 2.
The system is freely downloadable from its website at https://sparsar.wordpress.com/sparsar/ where a number of poems read by the system and Mac TTS can be found.
- 3.
There exist languages with subject in second or third position and word order OSV or OVS, but they are really few. Word orders of the world are skewed in favor of the three SOV, SVO, and VSO (see Comrie, 1989:102).
- 4.
LDC = left dislocated complement; S_DIS = dislocated subject (postposed); S_TOP = topicalized subject (preposed); S_FOC = focalized subject (inverted); DisMods = discontinuous modifiers which include PP, PbyP, PofP, VP, RelCl, AP
- 5.
In particular Shklovsky introduced the idea that defamiliarization could be achieved manipulating composition.
- 6.
See a dedicated bibliography of works consulted on the topic at the end of the chapter.
- 7.
Kerrigan (1986:76) enumerates the themes recurrent in Shakespeare and previous sonneteers: “The parodies of Petrarchan praise in sonnets 21 and 130; the satire on learned language in sonnets 78 and 85); and the satire on sycophantic poets in sonnet 79 and newfangled poets in sonnet 76; the revisionism with respect to Christian views of lust in sonnet 129 and continence in sonnet 94, and with respect to Petrarchan views of love in sonnet 116; the querying of eternizing boasts in sonnet 122, of the Platonic conventions in sonnet 95, of dramatic plot in sonnet 144, of enumerative praise in sonnet 84, of ‘idolatry’ in sonnet 105, of the Lord’s Prayer in sonnet 108 and eventually of love-pursuit in sonnet 143.”
- 8.
Melchiori notes in the Introduction (ibid.:19) that the period that goes from 1592 to 1598 is when almost all publications of sonnets have appeared in England. After that period, publications of sonnets almost disappeared, exception made for John Donne’s sacred sonnets and Shakespeare’s ones.
- 9.
And as far as the most frequently evoked theme in the sonnets is concerned, he writes: “Shakespeare’s sequence explores love in an impressively wide range of moods, situations, and expressions. It describes love between two men, as well as love between men and women. It depicts love between the old and the young. It portrays love traversing putative social and gender-based hierarchies in both directions. It characterizes love as a highly idealized emotion, and as a deeply degrading passion. With all their various love objects, the sonnets explore an enormous range of emotional temperatures, from cool deference to fevered passion.”
- 10.
The study covers 250 years from c. 1480 to c. 1730 divided up into three periods: the second period goes from 1580 to 1630, and it is the one we are interested in. The study is produced on a corpus of 15,000 example sentences extracted from a corpus of approximately 1000 pages of text; sentences under study start mainly with an element which is not the subject of the sentence: overall only 15.8% of these are inverted structures; however their presence is distributed in almost equal measure (20% in period I and 19% in period II) in Early Modern English and much less in period III with 9%. As the author reports in a footnote (f. 4:395), initial indirect object and object predicatives are rare in the corpus and are not discussed in the paper. However, examples 1–4 and 6–8 are all cases of object predicative fronted with nothing in first position, and more examples can be found of oblique complements to intransitive verbs which the author wrongly classifies simply as prepositional phrases at the same level of adverbials.
- 11.
The proportion of new subject in inverted position (XVS) is reported to be 30% to 12% in the first two periods and 50% to 13% in the third period.
- 12.
- 13.
This theme has been discussed and reported in many papers and also on a website – http://originalpronunciation.com/ – by the traditional linguist David Crystal. In particular he collects and comments in (Crystal 2011) rhyming words whose pronunciation is different from Modern RP English pronunciation listing more than 130 such cases in the sonnets. However, he does not provide a rigorous proposal to cope with the problem of rhyme violation, and the list of transformations contains many mistakes when compared with the full transcription of the sonnets published in Crystal (2007).
- 14.
As is being asserted by Ben and David Crystal, this can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMwAHeAdL80
- 15.
Consider, as an exemplar case, the word “blood” and its rhyming pair in all the sonnets: “brood” in Sonnet XIX and “good” in Sonnets CIX and CXXI. In all these cases, it will always have to be pronounced as its current corresponding German word “Blut” but with a final /d/.
- 16.
We use 1909 Vol 2. edition that can be freely visualized at
- 17.
These files have been produced also, thanks to the support of my collaborator Francesco Stiffoni who implemented two simple apps. One application under Universal Windows Platform for Speech Recognition and TTS which allows to synthesize an SSML file using WinRT APIs converting it to speech. It is possible to choose the speaker’s voice male or female, en-GB or en-US, and it is also possible to listen to the speech synthesizer reading a simple text with no intervention whatsoever. This interface is important because it allows to correct errors that the TTS may make by pronouncing words with wrong stress position (‘object, rather than ob’ject), or simply without any volume because monosyllable grammar word is usually unstressed (me, you), etc. The correct SSML file is then passed to another application running under Windows PowerShell which is used to produce the corresponding speech wav file from the input. Here below the 35 most popular sonnets with the accompanying ssml and wav file
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Delmonte, R. (2022). Cognitive Models of Poetry Reading. In: Danesi, M. (eds) Handbook of Cognitive Mathematics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44982-7_19-3
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