Channels, Fall 2017

Channels • 2017 • Volume 2 • Number 1 Page 13 Linguistic Self-Awareness and Poetry Preference Brice Montgomery English — Cedarville University Introduction anguage is the foundation of culture, and poetry is a form of discourse unlike any other. It is creative and subverts many of the rules of standard spoken or written English. But what is happening beneath the surface of a poem? I hypothesize that appraisal of literary value is closely related to the frequency with which certain linguistic features appear. This study will focus primarily on phonemic play (alliteration, rhyme, assonance, etc.) and semantic stretching or variability with brief attention to syntactic subversion as necessary. Literature Review The number of studies that approach poetry from its roots up is limited. That noted, there are indeed some projects that set a precedent and provide a helpful model for this particular exercise. For example, studies by Dalvean (2013) and Kao & Jurafsky (2015) analyzed poetry corpora for repeated features. Kao & Jurafsky’s study found that Imagism, a poetic movement towards concrete language (pine incense, etc.) and fewer emotionally- charged abstract words (love, etc.), has widened the gap between modern and amateur poetry as the latter, according to the study, tends to be modeled after older poetic works. This study is useful for a few reasons, namely because it indicates there are linguistic patterns in poetry, particularly semantic ones. More notable, however, is the fact that amateur poets model their work on that of older poets and tend to use more abstract and emotional language. The participants in my study will have had limited exposure to modern poetry, which means they will bring a similarly untrained “eye” to the work placed before them. Dalvean’s study extended Kao & Jurafsky’s project by analyzing a corpus of what are considered to be the best American poems. Throughout the pieces, he identified ninety- eight linguistic and psycholinguistic variables and found that they correlated to the perceived quality or professionalism of the conventions in the genre as it is now. Dalvean compiled his project in an algorithm-based program available online. Although the direct application of the program in this project is limited, it may effectively gauge the tastes of the participants in this study. With this macro view established, it is necessary to consider projects on individual poems. L