Semantic sets and Dylan Thomas' “light breaks”

Abstract

The present article aims to show that the elicitation of intuitive literary-aesthetic sentence judgments taps into readers’ poetry-specific linguistic register, and how such judgment methods can be used to support and constrain future theory formation in experimental poetics. In two experiments, we examined effects of deviant and parallelistic linguistic features on readers’ grammatical and literary-aesthetic evaluation of single sentences.In Experiment 1, participants rated carefully selected and modified lines of German poetry for either acceptability or poeticity (n = 40 each) on a 7-point scale; original lines featured grammatical deviations that were absent in modified versions. All investigated deviation types reduced the acceptability of the lines, but only routine licenses of German poetry increased their perceived poeticity and showed moderate to strong correlations between poeticity and deviance (i.e., low acceptability).In Experiment 2, participants made forced acceptability (n = 120) or poeticity (n = 120) choices regarding two (out of four) syntactic variants of a single sentence; variants crossed syntactic canonicity (canonical/non-canonical) and sentence rhythm (alternating/non-alternating). Acceptability choices favored only canonical syntax; poeticity choices were sensitive to both variables, and favored non-canonical syntax and alternating sentence rhythms.Our results indicate that poeticity judgments reflect categorical and gradient genre-specific well-formedness (Exp. 1), and that poeticity criteria are similar for traditional verse and for regular sentences without salient genre cues (Exp. 2). The observed prosodic and grammatical preferences suggest that perceptual fluency and conceptual challenge are prototypical characteristics of poetry reading. We conclude that sentence judgments can reveal whether and to which degree specific features of linguistic structure contribute to poetic effects.