International journal of literary linguistics
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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.
Editorial
(2013)
The aim of this two-part special issue of The International Journal of Literary Linguistics is to probe the implications of the cognitive turn in literary linguistics that has gone hand in hand with the field’s growing appreciation of pragmatics at the end of the twentieth century (as illustrated e.g. by MacMahon, Mey, Verdonk and Weber). The view, increasingly shared by literary linguists, that literature is a communicative endeavour between text (author) and reader has resulted in a heightened interest in the cognitive abilities that ultimately make this communication possible. Yet the ease with which the buzzword ‘cognition’ sometimes is applied to explain these abilities and processes (which are often only assumed to exist rather than substantiated with empirical evidence) seems to be at odds not least with the fact that the cognitive sciences are far from a uniform field yielding fixed and finite results. Indeed, whether or not all language phenomena are underpinned by innate cognitive rules is an issue that remains a bone of contention amongst scholars, as does the nature of these cognitive rules themselves. Even a cognitive grammarian like Ronald Langacker warns against jumping to premature conclusions about the natural foundations of language (14) and avoids making such claims in his own work. ...