What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive? The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception (Sound and Meaning : The Roman Jakobson Series in Linguistics and Poetic) - Softcover

Reuven Tsur

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822311704 ISBN 13: 9780822311706

Verlag: Duke University Press, 1992

Inhaltsangabe

Poets, academics, and those who simply speak a language are subject to mysterious intuitions about the perceptual qualities and emotional symbolism of the sounds of speech. Such intuitions are Reuven Tsur’s point of departure in this investigation into the expressive effect of sound patterns, addressing questions of great concern for literary theorists and critics as well as for linguists and psychologists.
Research in recent decades has established two distinct types of aural perception: a nonspeech mode, in which the acoustic signals are received in the manner of musical sounds or natural noises; and a speech mode, in which acoustic signals are excluded from awareness and only an abstract phonetic category is perceived. Here, Tsur proposes a third type of speech perception, a poetic mode in which some part of the acoustic signal becomes accessible, however faintly, to consciousness.
Using Roman Jakobson’s model of childhood acquisition of the phonological system, Tsur shows how the nonreferential babbling sounds made by infants form a basis for aesthetic valuation of language. He tests the intersubjective and intercultural validity of various spatial and tactile metaphors for certain sounds. Illustrating his insights with reference to particular literary texts, Tsur considers the relative merits of cognitive and psychoanalytic approaches to the emotional symbolism of speech sounds.

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Poets, academics, and those who simply speak a language are subject to mysterious intuitions about the perceptual qualities and emotional symbolism of the sounds of speech. Such intuitions are Reuven Tsur's point of departure in this investigation into the expressive effect of sound patterns, addressing questions of great concern for literary theorists and critics as well as linguists and psychologists.

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What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive?

The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception

By Reuven Tsur

Duke University Press

Copyright © 1992 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-1170-6

Contents

Preface, 
1 How Do Sound Patterns Know They Are Expressive? The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception, 
2 On Musicality in Verse and Phonological Universals, 
3 Some Spatial and Tactile Metaphors for Sounds, 
4 A Reading of Rimbaud's "Voyelles", 
5 Psychoanalytic or Cognitive Explanation, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

How Do Sound Patterns Know They Are Expressive? The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception

Expressive Sound Patterns

Children often ask: "How does the dog know that barking dogs don't bite"? Similarly, it seems worth asking: May we attribute to dogs and sounds just any property we like, or is there something in the nature of dogs and sounds that warrants the attribution of these properties and renders their behavior consistent? Literary critics and ordinary readers usually have strong intuitions about the expressiveness of sound patterns in poetry. A vast literature exists on the subject; however, much of it is ad hoc, arbitrary, or skeptical. "It is precisely critics interested in the meaning and idea-content of poetry," says Hrushovski (1968: 410), "that feel some kind of embarrassment toward the existence of sound organization, and attempt to enlist it in the service of the total interpretation. As against this approach there are critics and theoreticians who deny all in all the very existence of specific meanings attributable to specific sounds."

In what follows I shall adopt Hrushovski's approach, according to which the various language sounds have certain general potentialities of meaningful impression (412) and can be combined with other elements so that they impress the reader as if they expressed some specific meaning (411). My claim is that these general potentialities—which I shall refer to as combinational potential—have firm, intersubjective foundations on the acoustic, phonetic, or phonological levels of the sound structure of language. More specifically, I shall rely on a simplified version of the mechanism as put forward by Liberman and his colleagues at the Haskins Laboratories, by which listeners decode the sounds and recover the phonemes.

Hrushovski claims that much of the dispute over whether sound can or cannot be expressive comes to a dead end because the issue is treated as if it were one phenomenon. "As a matter of fact, there are several kinds of relations between sound and meaning, and in each kind the problem is revealed in different forms" (412). He discusses four kinds of such relations: (a) Onomatopoeia; (b) Expressive Sounds; (c) Focusing Sound Patterns; (d) Neutral Sound Patterns. The main business of this book concerns the second of these relations, but my discussions will have some implications for the first. Hrushovski describes expressive sound pattern as follows: "A sound combination is grasped as expressive of the tone, mood or some general quality of meaning. Here, an abstraction from the sound pattern (i.e. some kind of tone or 'quality' of the sounds is parallel to an abstraction from the meaning of the words (tone, mood etc.)" (444).

Traditional poetics has important things to say about how "tone, mood etc." are abstracted from the meaning of the words. But how are they abstracted from the speech sounds? In this chapter I shall look into some possible sources of the "tone" or "quality" of the sounds and the way that tone or quality is grasped in relation to an abstraction from the meaning of the words (tone, mood, emotion, etc.). One important aspect of the issue is that sounds are what I call "double-edged"; that is, they may be expressive of vastly different, or even opposing, qualities. Thus, the sibilants /s/ and /š/ may have a hushing quality in one context and a harsh quality to varying degrees in some others. Hrushovski quotes Poe's line

And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain

where the sibilants may be onomatopoetic, imitating the noises; or they may reinforce—or be expressive of—a quiet mood in Shakespeare's sonnet:

When to the sessions of sweet, silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste.

My argument relies on the assumption that sounds are bundles of features on the acoustic, phonetic, and phonological levels. The various features may have different expressive potentialities. The claim I shallelaborate is that in different contexts, different potentialities of the various features of the same sounds may be realized. Thus, the sibilants /s/ and /š/ at some level of description may have features with noisy potential and others with hushing potential. In Poe's line the former is realized by the contents, in Shakespeare's quatrain the latter.

At the beginning of Fónagy's article on communication in poetry (1961), statistical methods are applied to the expressive correspondence between mood and sound quality in poetry. This work is of particular interest for at least two reasons. First, it does not investigate the relations of sounds with specific themes, but with highly generic moods: tender and aggressive. Second, it does not consider these moods in isolation, but as a pair of opposites whose mutual relations may be treated in terms of more/less rather than in absolute terms. The data Fónagy presents are illuminating and highly suggestive. In six especially tender and six especially aggressive poems by the Hungarian poet Sándor Petofi,

the majority of sounds occur with the same relative frequency in both groups. All the more striking is the fact that the frequency of certain sounds shows a significant difference in both groups. The phonemes /l/, /m/, and /n/ are definitely more frequent in tender-toned poems, whereas /k/, /t/, and /r/ predominate in those with aggressive tone. For some reason, precisely these sounds seem to be the most significantly correlated with aggression, either positively, or negatively. (195)

The phonemes /m/ and /n/ have a similar negative correlation with aggression in poems by Hugo and Verlaine; /l/ is overwhelmingly tender for Verlaine, but not for Hugo. The voiceless stops /k/ and /t/ are significantly less frequent in tender poems by Petofi, Verlaine and Hugo, and Rückert (Hungarian, French, and German poets). So, this distribution is surely not language-dependent. It would be interesting to know, to what extent if at all, "double-edgedness" is responsible for the equal distribution of other sounds in both groups of poems, owing to conflicting features' canceling out each others' influence (I shall try to answer this question later on). As for vowels, Fónagy mentions Macdermott who, through a statistical analysis of English poems, found that dark vowels are more frequent in lines referring to dark colors, mystic obscurity, or slow and heavy movement, or depicting hatred and struggle (Fónagy, 1961: 194). From this summary, one might expect to find a greater frequency of dark vowels in aggressive poems than in tender ones. Fónagy's investigation of Petofi's poetry reveals that this is indeed the case (for the other poets, he gives only the consonant distribution). Whereas dark vowels occurred in Standard Hungarian 38.88 percent of the time, in Petofi's aggressive poems it was 44.38 percent,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1992
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822311704
• ISBN 13: 9780822311706
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 190
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland