There is no psychological limit on the duration of metrical lines in performance : against Turner and Pöppel
- Frederick Turner and Ernst Pöppel (1983) proposed that lines of metrical poetry tend to measure three seconds or less when performed aloud, and that the metrical line is fitted to a three second "auditory present" in the brain. In this paper I show that there are faults both in their original argument, and in the claims which underlie it. I present new data, based on the measurement of line durations in publicly available recorded performances of 54 metrical poems; in this corpus, lines of performed metrical verse are often longer than three seconds: 59% of the 1155 lines are longer than 3 seconds, 40% longer than 3.5 seconds and 26% longer than 4 seconds. On the basis of weaknesses in the original paper, and the new data presented here, I propose, against Turner and Pöppel, that there is no evidence that lines of verse are constrained by a time-limited psychological capacity.
Author: | Nigel Fabb |
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URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-484011 |
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.15462/ijll.v2i1.14 |
ISSN: | 2194-5594 |
Parent Title (English): | International journal of literary linguistics : IJLL |
Publisher: | Johannes Gutenberg-Universität |
Place of publication: | Mainz, Germany |
Document Type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Year of Completion: | 2013 |
Date of first Publication: | 2013/10/18 |
Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
Release Date: | 2018/11/27 |
Tag: | Metre; line; performance; time; working memory |
Volume: | 2 |
Issue: | 1 |
Page Number: | 29 |
First Page: | 1 |
Last Page: | 29 |
Note: | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ |
HeBIS-PPN: | 43997352X |
Dewey Decimal Classification: | 4 Sprache / 41 Linguistik / 410 Linguistik |
Sammlungen: | Linguistik |
Zeitschriften / Jahresberichte: | International journal of literary linguistics |
: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-483647 |
Licence (German): | Creative Commons - Namensnennung 3.0 |