Abstract
A growing body of literature in psychology, linguistics, and the neurosciences has paid increasing attention to the understanding of the relationships between phonological representations of words and their meaning: a phenomenon also known as phonological iconicity. In this article, we investigate how a text's intended emotional meaning, particularly in literature and poetry, may be reflected at the level of sublexical phonological salience and the use of foregrounded elements. To extract such elements from a given text, we developed a probabilistic model to predict the exceeding of a confidence interval for specific sublexical units concerning their frequency of occurrence within a given text contrasted with a reference linguistic corpus for the German language. Implementing this model in a computational application, we provide a text analysis tool which automatically delivers information about sublexical phonological salience allowing researchers, inter alia, to investigate effects of the sublexical emotional tone of texts based on current findings on phonological iconicity.
Highlights
How do literary texts affect the reader? Can sounds have intrinsic, autonomous meaning, in literary and poetic language?The Russian Formalists were the first to examine these questions in a systematic fashion
TESTING AN EXEMPLARY HYPOTHESIS To illustrate the potential use of Emophon as a linguistic instrument for analyzing the phonological salient units in texts following an exemplary hypothesis, we focus on the theory of foregrounding assuming that poetic language deviates from norms characterizing ordinary language use
In this paper, we presented a computer-linguistic tool automatically transforming digitally presented text into phonetic transcriptions, the absolute frequencies of which are documented and compared to expectation values derived from a large scale database of 25 Million German words representing everyday language use
Summary
How do literary texts affect the reader? Can sounds have intrinsic, autonomous meaning, in literary and poetic language?The Russian Formalists were the first to examine these questions in a systematic fashion. Over the last two decades, the study of the aestheticized form of language (e.g., literature, poetry) has been complemented by developments in cognitive linguistics, and by research into an area at the interface between linguistics, literary studies, and cognitive psychology known as “cognitive poetics” (e.g., Tsur, 1992; Miall and Kuiken, 1994; Stockwell, 2002; Gavins and Gerard, 2003), “cognitive stylistics” (e.g., Semino and Culpeper, 2002; Semino, 2009), and “neurocognitive poetics” (e.g., Jacobs, 2011, 2013, 2014) This interdisciplinary field offers (neuro-) cognitive hypotheses to relate “the specific effects of poetry” to “the particular regularities that occur in literary texts” in a systematic way (Tsur, 2003). In contrast to other areas of literary studies, (neuro-)cognitive poetics deals with the central question of how readers comprehend and interpret the language of literary texts by conducting experiments “with different types of literary discourse, in different reading contexts with different kinds of readers” (Van Dijk, 1979)
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