Semantic Features and Authorship Attribution

Abstract

The language of poetry is different from that employed in other categories of writing. ‘Defined from a linguistic perspective, poetry represents a variant form of language, different from speech and common writing, unique in its own way as a linguistic system’. This is particularly true of classical Chinese poetry, which, because of its formal restrictions in terms of syllables, tonal variations and rhyming patterns, commands a language system that appears to be delicately concise, finely rich and immensely rhetorical. It is thus linguistically complex, requiring a high degree of creativity to produce, sophisticated interpretation to read and often a significant level of difficulty to understand. A major difference between poetic language and other types of writing typically exists in its intentionally polysemous readings through the creative use of imagery as part of the poet’s artistic conception. Poetic imagery refers to the mental image that gets conjured up when we read poems, relating to the experience of the five senses, giving rise to some of the most frequently used rhetorical devices such as metaphor, simile, allegory and personification. According to Brown (1927, pp. 1–2), imageries are ‘words or phrases denoting a sense-perceptible object, used to designate not that object but some other object of thought belonging to a different order of being’. The term imagery is often used interchangeably with image. Here, imagery is differentiated from image in the sense that imagery denotes a system with component parts while image tends to be monolithic and undividable.