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

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

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Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Tsur, poetic mac daddy--cognitive science to the max...not
Review: The crux of Tsur's book is:

1) There is a certain kind of engagement that we can have with certain poems that leads to an intuitive awareness of kinds of significance that cannot be directly attributed to the resolution of the poem's language into a particular propositional understanding derived via habits of everyday speech interpretation. 2) The intuitive awareness that we have of the significance of a particular poem can be explained to a great extend through the interactions one has with the language of the poem which occur prior to, or in spite of, one's resolution of its particular aspects into conventional units of meaning. (The resolution of speech sound into units of meaning is a process with various steps. The two steps that Tsur focuses upon are the reduction of a sound stream to phonemic sounds, and the isolation of a frame of reference through which one can contain and differentiate between the specific semantic and referential contents of a linguistic sequence. Once one has accomplished the former step, he can address the sound stream as speech, and the latter leads to an understanding of speech.)

Expressive Sound and Double-Edgedness

The methodology that Tsur has developed to analyze the expressive nature of the sounds of poetic language relies heavily upon an approach to classifying the causal role of language structures in the synaesthetic experience of a particular linguistic articulation:

The problem of synaesthetic equivalences will cease to look embarrassingly arbitrary if, hereto, we fix out attention not one likeness of elements but on structural relationships within a scale or a matrix. When we say that i is brighter than u, we find a surprising degree of general consent. If we are more careful still and say that the step from u to i is more like an upward step, I think the majority will agree, whatever explanation each of may be inclined to offer. (Tsur 1992 citing Jakobson citing Grombich)

It is unnecessary and misleading to assert specific synaesthetic qualities as inhering in particular phonemes. It is better to say that a series phonemes can be arranged along a continuum which represents the extent to which each exemplifies a particular pertinent aspect of their common embodiment as sound, and that the terminal extremes of this continuum can be reasonably matched analogously to the terminal ends of a continuum measuring a some aspect that is synaesthetically experienced through the sound of language. These various mappings constitute the sound potential of a given phoneme. Double-edgedness is a result of the fact that various phonemes can be placed along various continuums measuring different aspects of their sound constitution, and that the degree to which a particular aspect of a phoneme's sound structure is foregrounded in a particular instance depends greatly upon contextual cues which determine the rhythm and intonation of our articulation of the phonemes involved. Thus, it is possible for one phoneme in different contexts to produce opposing intuitions. Tsur takes an example from Richards clearly demonstrating this phenomenon:

Compare for example:

Deep into a gloomy grot with Peep into a roomy cot. . .

In each of the two phrases different vowel features may be used to enhance meaning; this is the source of the double-edgedness of the sounds. In peep one tends to foreground the features [BRIGHT, HIGH], in deep the features [LONG, (FAR)DOWN]. In gloomy the feature [DARK] whereas in roomy the features [LONG, HIGH] (that is spacious) are likely to be foregrounded. (Tsur 1992)

It is Tsur's goal in What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive to discover the various expressive potencies of phonetic sounds and to develop this account as a way exploring the intuitions that are often experienced when reading certain poems or kinds of poetry.

Throughout his arguments concerning the expressive potential of phonetic sounds, Tsur relies heavily upon a distinction between one's categorical and pre-categorical awareness of language. According to Tsur, conventionally we repress our awareness of the specific qualities of the sound stream underlying a series of phonemes and hear only phonemes, or categorical sounds. Now, this argument while it remains unqualified is rather absurd. I don't have to be yelled at or threatened by someone to know that they are angry with me. And it's sometimes the case that after a conversation I have with someone, say my mother on the telephone, I have certain intuitions about her state of mind that are inexplicable in terms of the subject matter we discussed. Furthermore, it seems that in the course of daily conversation, where our words aren't painstakingly chosen to convey finely grained conceptual distinctions that (pre-categorical) cues conveyed through the rhythm and articulation of linguistic sequence are an indispensable resource for interpretation.

Tsur, despite the fact that his familiarity with linguistic research ends with the 70's offers us a practical insight-namely, to be able to respond to a particular aspect of a poem's meaning, namely the expressiveness of its sound, we must make a performance of it, in our heads or outloud. Barsalou, cites research showing that when we conceptualize or think about sounds, or rehearse them to our "mind's ear", areas of our auditory cortices show activation levels similar to those displayed when comparible sounds are actively perceived. Tsur gives us an account of one aspect of poetic significance that has eluded a systematic treatment in the field of literary theory, and consequently allows us to understand why it is that making a performance of a poem is critical to full engagement of its expressive potential. Furthermore, he gives convincing arguments concerning why it is that certain sounds produce certain effects in certain contexts.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Tsur, poetic mac daddy--cognitive science to the max...not
Review: The crux of Tsur's book is:

1)There is a certain kind of engagement that we can have with certain poems that leads to an intuitive awareness of kinds of significance that cannot be directly attributed to the resolution of the poem's language into a particular propositional understanding derived via habits of everyday speech interpretation. 2) The intuitive awareness that we have of the significance of a particular poem can be explained to a great extend through the interactions one has with the language of the poem which occur prior to, or in spite of, one's resolution of its particular aspects into conventional units of meaning. (The resolution of speech sound into units of meaning is a process with various steps. The two steps that Tsur focuses upon are the reduction of a sound stream to phonemic sounds, and the isolation of a frame of reference through which one can contain and differentiate between the specific semantic and referential contents of a linguistic sequence. Once one has accomplished the former step, he can address the sound stream as speech, and the latter leads to an understanding of speech.)

Expressive Sound and Double-Edgedness

The methodology that Tsur has developed to analyze the expressive nature of the sounds of poetic language relies heavily upon an approach to classifying the causal role of language structures in the synaesthetic experience of a particular linguistic articulation:

The problem of synaesthetic equivalences will cease to look embarrassingly arbitrary if, hereto, we fix out attention not one likeness of elements but on structural relationships within a scale or a matrix. When we say that i is brighter than u, we find a surprising degree of general consent. If we are more careful still and say that the step from u to i is more like an upward step, I think the majority will agree, whatever explanation each of may be inclined to offer. (Tsur 1992 citing Jakobson citing Grombich)

It is unnecessary and misleading to assert specific synaesthetic qualities as inhering in particular phonemes. It is better to say that a series phonemes can be arranged along a continuum which represents the extent to which each exemplifies a particular pertinent aspect of their common embodiment as sound, and that the terminal extremes of this continuum can be reasonably matched analogously to the terminal ends of a continuum measuring a some aspect that is synaesthetically experienced through the sound of language. These various mappings constitute the sound potential of a given phoneme. Double-edgedness is a result of the fact that various phonemes can be placed along various continuums measuring different aspects of their sound constitution, and that the degree to which a particular aspect of a phoneme's sound structure is foregrounded in a particular instance depends greatly upon contextual cues which determine the rhythm and intonation of our articulation of the phonemes involved. Thus, it is possible for one phoneme in different contexts to produce opposing intuitions. Tsur takes an example from Richards clearly demonstrating this phenomenon:

Compare for example:

Deep into a gloomy grot with Peep into a roomy cot. . .

In each of the two phrases different vowel features may be used to enhance meaning; this is the source of the double-edgedness of the sounds. In peep one tends to foreground the features [BRIGHT, HIGH], in deep the features [LONG, (FAR)DOWN]. In gloomy the feature [DARK] whereas in roomy the features [LONG, HIGH] (that is spacious) are likely to be foregrounded. (Tsur 1992)

It is Tsur's goal in What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive to discover the various expressive potencies of phonetic sounds and to develop this account as a way exploring the intuitions that are often experienced when reading certain poems or kinds of poetry.

Throughout his arguments concerning the expressive potential of phonetic sounds, Tsur relies heavily upon a distinction between one's categorical and pre-categorical awareness of language. According to Tsur, conventionally we repress our awareness of the specific qualities of the sound stream underlying a series of phonemes and hear only phonemes, or categorical sounds. Now, this argument while it remains unqualified is rather absurd. I don't have to be yelled at or threatened by someone to know that they are angry with me. And it's sometimes the case that after a conversation I have with someone, say my mother on the telephone, I have certain intuitions about her state of mind that are inexplicable in terms of the subject matter we discussed. Furthermore, it seems that in the course of daily conversation, where our words aren't painstakingly chosen to convey finely grained conceptual distinctions that (pre-categorical) cues conveyed through the rhythm and articulation of linguistic sequence are an indispensable resource for interpretation.

Tsur, despite the fact that his familiarity with linguistic research ends with the 70's offers us a practical insight-namely, to be able to respond to a particular aspect of a poem's meaning, namely the expressiveness of its sound, we must make a performance of it, in our heads or outloud. Barsalou, cites research showing that when we conceptualize or think about sounds, or rehearse them to our "mind's ear", areas of our auditory cortices show activation levels similar to those displayed when comparible sounds are actively perceived. Tsur gives us an account of one aspect of poetic significance that has eluded a systematic treatment in the field of literary theory, and consequently allows us to understand why it is that making a performance of a poem is critical to full engagement of its expressive potential. Furthermore, he gives convincing arguments concerning why it is that certain sounds produce certain effects in certain contexts.


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