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.
Similar content being viewed by others
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
References
Abbott, E. A. (1870). A Shakespearian grammar (3rd ed.). London: Macmillan.
Baekken, B. (1998). Word order patterns in early modern English. Oslo: Novus Press.
Baekken, B. (2000). Inversion in early modern English. English Studies, 81(5), 393–421.
Belke, B., Leder, H., Strohbach, T., & Carbon, C. C. (2010). Cognitive fluency: High-level processing dynamics in art appreciation. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 4(4), 214–222.
Bernard, C. (1989). Language universals and linguistic typology – Syntax and morphology (2nd ed.). The University of Chicago Press.
Birner, B., & Ward, G. (2004). Information structure and non-canonical syntax. In L. Horn & G. Ward (Eds.), The handbook of pragmatics (pp. 153–174). London: Blackwell.
Birner, B., & Ward, G. (2006). Information structure. In B. Aarts & A. McMahon (Eds.), The handbook of English linguistics (pp. 291–317). London: Blackwell.
Blake, N. (1983). Shakespeare’s language: An introduction. London: Macmillan.
Blake, N. (2002). A grammar of Shakespeare’s language. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Bresnan, J. (Ed.). (1982). The mental representation of grammatical relations. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Bresnan, J. (Ed.). (2001). Lexical-functional syntax. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Bullot N. J., & Reber, R. (2013). The artful mind meets art history. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36, 123–137.
Comrie, B. (1989). Language universals and linguistic typology – syntax and morphology, Second Edition. The Universityof Chicago Press.
Consoli, G. (2014). Recent evidence on perception and esthetic appreciation: The role of value and expertise in canon formation. i-Perception, 5, 94–96.
Culpeper, J. (2001). Language and characterisation: People in plays and other texts. Pearson, Harlow, 28, 202.
David, C. (2008). Think on my Words: Exploring Shakespeare's Language. Cambridge University Press.
Crystal David (2011) Sounding Out Shakespeare: Sonnet Rhymes in Original Pronunciation. downloadable from https://www.davidcrystal.com/GBR/Books-and-Articles under S.
Delmonte, R. (2015). Visualizing poetry with SPARSAR – poetic maps from poetic content. In Proceedings of NAACL-HLT Fourth Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature (pp. 68–78). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Delmonte, R. (2016a). Expressivity in TTS from Semantics and Pragmatics. In M. Vayra, C. Avesani, & F. Tamburini (Eds.), Il farsi e disfarsi del linguaggio. Acquisizione, mutamento e destrutturazione della struttura sonora del linguaggio/Language acquisition and language loss. Acquisition, change and disorders of the language sound structure (pp. 407–427). Milano: AISV. https://doi.org/10.17469/O2101AISV000026.
Delmonte R. (2016b) Syntactic and lexical complexity in Italian noncanonical structures, In Proceedings of the workshop on computational linguistics for linguistic complexity, COLING (pp. 67–78). Downloadable from http://aclweb.org/anthology/W/W16/W16-4108.pdf
Delmonte, R. (2016c). Exploring Shakespeare's sonnets with SPARSAR. Linguistics and Literature Studies, 4(1), 61–95. https://doi.org/10.13189/lls.2016.040110. Downloadable from https://www.hrpub.org/journals/article_info.php?aid=3215.
Delmonte R. (2018) Syntax and semantics of Italian poetry in the first half of the 20th century. In Umanistica Digitale, no.2 (pp. 35–66). Downloadable from https://umanisticadigitale.unibo.it/article/view/8053, https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2532-8816/8053.
Delmonte R. (2019a) Poetry and speech synthesis, SPARSAR recites, in Ricognizioni - Rivista di Lingue, Letterature e culture Moderne, II, VI (pp. 75–95). Downloadable from http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/ricognizioni/article/view/3302
Delmonte, R., & Busetto, N. (2019b). Detecting irony in Shakespeare’s sonnets with SPARSAR. In Proceedings of the sixth italian conference on computational linguistics. Downloadable from https://dblp.org/rec/bib/conf/clic-it/DelmonteB19.
Delmonte R., Ciprian Bacalu (2013) SPARSAR: A system for poetry automatic rhythm and style AnalyzeR. In: Proceedings SLATE. https://www.isca-speech.org/archive/slate_2013/sl13_095.html
Delmonte R., Anton Maria Prati (2014) SPARSAR: An expressive poetry reader. In: Proceedings of the demonstrations at the 14th conference of the European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 73–76). ACL, http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/E14-2019.
Delmonte R. Bristot A., Tonelli S. (2007) VIT - Venice Italian treebank: syntactic and quantitative features. In: K. De Smedt, Jan Hajic, Sandra Kübler (eds) Proceedings of sixth international workshop on treebanks and linguistic theories, Vol.1, Nealt Proc. Series, p. 43–54.
Devine, A. M., & Stephens, L. D. (2006). Latin Word Order: Structured Meaning and Information. OUP.
Fabo, Pablo Ruiz, Clara Martínez Cantón, and Thierry Poibeau (2017) Distant Rhythm: Automatic Enjambment Detection on Four Centuries of Spanish Sonnets. Digital Humanities.
Fanego, T. (1990a). Finite complement clauses in Shakespeare’s English. Part I. Studia Neo- philologica, 62(1), 3–21.
Fanego, T. (1990b). Finite complement clauses in Shakespeare’s English. Part II. Studia Neo- philologica, 62(2), 129–149.
Fitzgerald, C. M. (2007). An optimality treatment of syntactic inversions in English verse. Language Sciences, 29, 203–217.
Gianluca, C. (2014). Recent evidence on perception and esthetic appreciation: The role of value and expertise in canon formation. i-Perception, 5, 94–96.
Goodkind, A. Michelle Lee, Gary E. Martin, Molly Losh, Klinton Bicknell (2018) Detecting Language Impairments in Autism: A Computational Analysis of Semi-structured Conversations with Vector Semantics, in Proceedings of the Society of Computation in Linguistics, pp. 12–22.
Hale, J. (2003). The information conveyed by words in sentences. J. Psycholinguist. Res. 32, 101–123
Hale, J. (2006). Uncertainty about the rest of the sentence. Cognitive Science, 30(4), 643–672.
Hope, J. (2003). Shakespeare’s grammar. London: Arden Shakespeare.
Hope, J. (2010). Shakespeare and language: Reason, eloquence and artifice in the renaissance. London: Arden Shakespeare.
Houston, J. P. (1988). Shakespearean sentences: A study in style and syntax. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Ingham, M. (2013). Syntax and subtext: Diachronic variables, displacement and proximity in the verse dramas of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Shakespeare, 11(2), 1–19.
Ingham, R., & Ingham, M. (2011). Chapter 5: Subject-verb inversion and iambic rhythm in Shakespeare’s dramatic verse. In M. Ravassat & J. Culpeper (Eds.), Stylistics and Shakespeare’s language: Transdisciplinary approaches (pp. 98–118). London: Continuum.
Kaplan, Ronald M., Joan Bresnan (1982) Lexical-functional Grammar: A formal system for grammatical representation (pp. 173–281).
Kerrigan, J. (Ed.). (1986). “The sonnets” and “a Lover’s complaint.”. New York: Penguin.
Levy, R. (2008). Expectation-based Syntactic Com- prehension. Cognition, 106(3), 1126–1177.
Levy, R., Fedorenko, E., Breen, M., & Gibson, T. (2012). The processing of Extraposed structures in English. Cognition, 122(1).
Mambrini F., M. Passarotti (2013) Non-projectivity in the Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank. In: Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (DepLing 2013) (pp. 177–186).
André Mazarin (2020) The developmental progression of English vowel systems, 1500–1800: Evidence from grammarians, in Ampersand 7. Downloadable at, https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S2215039020300011? token=BCB9A7B6C95F35D354C940E08CBA968ED124CF160B0AC3EF5FE9146C4B3885E825A878104ED06E127685F139918CCEB6
McGuire, P. C. (1987a). Shakespeare’s non-shakespearean sonnets. Shakespeare Quarterly, 38(3), 304–319.
Roman, J. (1980). A postscript to the discussion on grammar of poetry. Diacritics, 10(1), 21–35.
Simonton, D. K. (1989). Shakespeare's sonnets: A case of and for single-case Historiometry, Shakespeare’s sonnets: A case of and for single-case historiometry. Journal of Personality, 57, 695–721.
Simonton, D. K. (1990). Lexical choices and aesthetic success: A computer content analysis of 154 Shakespeare sonnets. Computers and the Humanities, 24(4), 251–264.
Peter Stockwell (2002) Cognitive poetics - an introduction. Routledge, (ebook 2005), London.
Vietor Wilhelm (1909) A Shakespeare phonology. Marburg/London.
Youmans, G. (1983). Generative tests for generative meter. Language, 59(1), 67–92.
Works Consulted on Shakespeare’s Poetry, Style, and Grammar
Alphonso Smith, C. (1896). Shakespeare's present indicative S-endings with plural subjects: A study in the grammar of the first folio, PMLA. Modern Language Association, 11(4), 363–376.
Bennett, P. E. (1957). The statistical measurement of a stylistic trait in Julius Caesar and as you like it. Shakespeare Quarterly, Oxford University Press, 8(1), 33–50.
Fanego, T. (1990). Finite complement clauses in Shakespeare’s English, part I, Studia Neophilologica 62(1): 3-21 - part II. Studia Neophilologica, 62(2), 129–149.
Hardie, A., & van Dorst, I. (2020). A survey of grammatical variability in early modern English drama. Language and Literature, 29(3), 275–301.
Holmes, D. I. (1985). The analysis of literary style--a review, journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series a (general). Wiley for the Royal Statistical Society, 148(4), 328–341.
Joachim Neuhaus, H., & Spevack, M. (1975). A Shakespeare dictionary (SHAD): Some preliminaries for a semantic description. Computers and the Humanities, 9(6), 263–270.
Kerrigan, W., & Braden, G. (1989). The idea of the renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Langworthy, C. A. (1931). A verse-sentence analysis of Shakespeare’s plays, PMLA. Modern Language Association, 46(3), 738–751.
MacIsaac, W. J. (1974). Viva voce: On speaking and hearing Shakespeare's sentences. Shakespeare Quarterly, Spring, Oxford University Press, 25(2), 172–187.
McAleese, G. (2007). Improving Scansion with Syntax: an Investigation into the Effectiveness of a Syntactic Analysis of Poetry by Computer using Phonological Scansion Theory. Department of Computing, Technical Report NO 2007/26.
McGuire, P. C. (1987b). Shakespeare’s non-shakespearean sonnets. Shakespeare Quarterly, 38(3), 304–319.
Parker, P. (1992). Preposterous events. Shakespeare Quarterly, Oxford University Press, 43(2), 186–213.
Pirkhofer, A. M. (1963). “A pretty pleasing pricket”–on the use of alliteration in Shakespeare’s sonnets. Shakespeare Quarterly. Oxford University Press, 14(1), 3–14.
Shore, D. (2015). Shakespeare’s construction. Shakespeare Quarterly, 66(2), 113–136.
Tarlinskaja, M. (1987). Rhythm and meaning: “rhythmical figures” in English iambic pentameter, their grammar, and their links with semantics, style, rhythm, rhetoric, revision. Penn State University Press, 21(1), 1–35.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Electronic Supplementary Material
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
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_19-2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44982-7_19-2
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-44982-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-44982-7
eBook Packages: Springer Reference MathematicsReference Module Computer Science and Engineering
Publish with us
Chapter history
-
Latest
Cognitive Models of Poetry Reading- Published:
- 27 September 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44982-7_19-4
-
Cognitive Models of Poetry Reading
- Published:
- 02 September 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44982-7_19-3
-
Cognitive Models of Poetry Reading
- Published:
- 16 July 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44982-7_19-2
-
Original
Cognitive Models of Poetry Reading- Published:
- 03 March 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44982-7_19-1