1,163 research outputs found
Rhyme and alliteration are significantly different as types of sound patterning
Get PDFIn this paper I argue that rhyme and alliteration are significantly different as types of sound patterning. They differ in more than their position within the syllable or word. This difference emerges when we look at different kinds of verbal art in which rhyme or alliteration are used systematically. I suggest that there are possible psychological reasons for the difference, relating to memory and attention
Rhyme in the languages and cultures of the world : an introduction
Get PDFRhyme is found in verbal arts throughout the world. In the appendix to this introduction, we offer a partial list of languages whose associated verbal arts sometimes have rhyme
Language and literary structure : the linguistic analysis of form in verse and narrative
No full textHow does a literary text get to have literary form, and what is the relation between literary form and linguistic form? This theoretical study of linguistic structure in literature focuses on verse and narrative from a linguistic perspective. Nigel Fabb provides a simple and realistic linguistic explanation of poetic form in English from 1500–1900, drawing on the English and American verse and oral narrative tradition, as well as contemporary criticism. In recent years literary theory has paid relatively little attention to form; this book argues that form is interesting. Fabb offers a new linguistic approach to how metre and rhythm work in poetry, based on pragmatic theory and provides a pragmatic explanation of formal ambiguity and indeterminacy and their aesthetic effects. He also uses linguistics to examine the experience of poetry. Language and Literary Structure will be welcomed by students and researchers in linguistics, literary theory and stylistics
How to write essays, dissertations and theses in literary studies
No full textThis book has been designed both to be read through as a whole for ideas, general guidelines and practical suggestions, and to be consulted at any difficult stage of a particular research or writing project. Nigel Fabb and Alan Durant take the reader through the various stages of writing an essay, dissertation or thesis, from beginning to final submission, and offer specific guidelines and a lively and detailed commentary on actual examples of student work at each stage
Poetic parallelism and working memory
No full textA widespread kind of parallelism is a relation between sections of text such that each resembles the other in linguistic form, or in lexical meaning, or in both form and meaning. In poetry, this kind of parallelism can be systematic, and when it is, it holds between two adjacent sections. The new claim of this article is that these sections are short enough for the whole parallel pair to be held in working memory (in the episodic buffer). Parallelism thus shares a property with the other added forms of poetry - meter, rhyme and alliteration - that it holds over material which can be held as a whole section (such as line or couplet) in working memory. I conclude by suggesting that processing the parallel pair in working memory brings advantages to the poetry: an emotional effect from contrastive valence, an epistemic effect from the fluency heuristic, and the production of metaphorical meaning
Rhythm requires poetic sections
No full textThis is a proposed as an absolute (implicational) universal, and comes from Fabb and Halle (Meter): Where a text has a sustained regular rhythm, it is also divided into sections of determinate length. Texts with a regular rhythm (sustained over a long stretch of the text) are called metrical. The rhythm need not be periodic, and can vary; it is regular in the sense that it includes a range of variations which are overall subject to a set of rules. In other words, metres are found in poems, defined as texts which are divided into poetic sections. The following definition is from Fabb
Is literary language a development of ordinary language?
No full textContemporary literary linguistics is guided by the 'Development Hypothesis' which says that literary language is formed and regulated by developing only the elements, rules and constraints of ordinary language. Six ways of differentiating literary language from ordinary language are tested against the Development Hypothesis, as are various kinds of superadded constraint including metre, rhyme and alliteration and parallelism. Literary language differs formally, but is unlikely to differ semantically from ordinary language. The article concludes by asking why the Development Hypothesis might hold
Formal interactions in poetic meter
No full textI show how the theory of Fabb & Halle (2008) accounts for Icelandic dróttkvætt. This theoretical framework enables us to show that distinct forms-such as rhyme and alliteration - within a meter can either co-occur without being inter-related, or that one form can be dependent on another. In dróttkvætt, stress-placement is dependent on the grid, while alliteration and rhyme are both components of the meter which are independent of the grid. I also look at Vietnamese verse and show that here too there are issues of complexity of interaction of rules
Generated metrical form and implied metrical form
No full textMetrical verse is characterized by rules and by tendencies. In English iambic pentameter, a stressed syllable must be in an even-numbered position or first position if it is in a polysyllable; it will tend to be in an even-numbered position or first position if it is a monosyllable. This example demonstrates that there is an apparent relation between rule and tendency (they relate similar phonological characteristics to the same positions in the line), which raises the possibility that they should be explained together, and indeed this has generally been assumed. Howe¬ver, I will argue in this paper that rules and tendencies require completely different kinds of explanation. Rules are explained by a generative theory (specifically Bracketed Grid theory, Fabb and Halle (forthcoming)); tendencies are explained by a pragmatic theory (specifically Relevance Theory, Sperber and Wilson (1995))
Dylan Thomas's meters
No full textThis chapter applies to Dylan Thomas’s metrical poetry the theory of meter de- veloped in collaboration with Carlos Piera in Fabb and Halle (2008). We explain the various properties of the strict and loose meters used by Thomas. We also discuss some poems which can be analyzed as simultaneously in two meters at the same time: a strict syllable-counting meter and a loose stress-based meter. These polymetrical poems may reflect the influence, possibly mediated through Gerard Manley Hopkins, of the Welsh poetic tradition
- …
