Phonemic Accumulations and the Analysis of Poetry

Ishall present my latest work on the theory of phonemic
accumulations and its application to the study of poetry.
Computerized stylistics tends to concentrate on words: word
frequencies, word co-occurrences, word collocations, and word
distributions. My computer-assisted study of stylistics
concentrates on the phonemic content of the texts. Computerized
phonemic analysis is beginning to yield interesting insights into
written texts, especially those, such as poetry, for which sound
patterning constitutes a significant element. In A Companion
to Digital Humanities (2004), Ian Lancashire mentions sound
as a future source of inquiry in textual stylistics: “As the
implications of cognitive research become understood,
text-analysis systems may change, and with them stylistics.
Texts in languages whose spelling departs widely from its
sounding will likely be routinely translated into a phonological
alphabet, before processing, as researchers recognize the
primacy of the auditory in mental language processing”
(“Cognitive Stylistics and the Literary Imagination”). I have
begun undertaking this work with a computer application that
translates poems into their broad phonetic transcriptions. The
program can then provide visualizations of the phonemic
content of the poems, and it can perform calculations on the
content.
The theory of phonemic accumulations is based on the theory
of the persistence of vision: the effect of a phoneme when
reading is carried through to the following phonemes. At the
same time, its effect tapers off. When the same phoneme is
encountered while the effect of the first phoneme has not been
nullified, a cumulative effect of the two phonemes is produced.
This gives rise to important sound effects in poetry and literature
in general, the most obvious of which is alliteration. The
cumulative effect of the /s/ phonemes in “silver silent sails” far
exceeds the effect of the individual /s/ phonemes if the words
occurred at a greater distance from each other. My computer
program is able to quantify the impression the /s/ phonemes
may have on the reader of these words.
While many different possibilities present themselves for
analysis, my current work focusses on calculations of the
fricative accumulations and the plosive accumulations of a
poem. The fricative consonants are often regarded as soft
sounds, while the plosive consonants are often regarded as
harsh sounds. I have already shown that the percentage of
plosives and fricatives in poems is mostly constant across poems
and authors. Consequently, the occurrence of these phonemes
on their own do not produce a significant effect; it is the
groupings or occurrences in proximity with each other that
seem to produce effects upon the reader. Graphs of their
phonemic accumulations exhibit distinct peaks and troughs,
and the differences between the two accumulations reveal
interesting insights.
For example, Robert Browning’s “Two in the Campagna” has
a very intense climax of the difference of the fricative and
plosive accumulations in its fifth, sixth, and seventh stanzas.
These stanzas are those that are most expressive of true love
and passion: while the whole poem is an expression of love,
more negative thoughts such as the fleetingness of life and the
inability to achieve true love on earth are intermingled with the
attempts to seduce. The three stanzas with the fricative
accumulation climax, however, are the most rhapsodic, the least
tainted with doubt. Similarly, in Browning’s “Porphyria’s
Lover,” a poem about the murdering of a woman whom the
speaker loves too intensely, the stanza (or five-line set—the
poem is not officially divided into stanzas) with the greatest
climax of the difference of the fricative and plosive
accumulations is the fifth, where the speaker of the poem tells
how Porphyria expresses her love for him. The rest of the poem
is predominantly heavier on the plosive accumulation side. The
pattern that emerges is that when the difference between the
fricative and plosive accumulations favours the fricatives, the
sentiment of the poem is more positive, loving, and sincere.
When the plosives are favoured, the sentiment of the poem is
more insincere, withdrawn, and bleak. I shall present my results
for these and other poems of a similar structure. These are early
results, but the results are very promising.
This work is important for the study of literature. This is the
first time (that I am aware of) that the phonemic content of a
text, i.e. its sound on the page, is put to such advanced
calculations. Literary analyses often have to rely upon
impressionistic language when discussing the effect of the
sounds of the words upon the reader: phrases such as, “the
prevalence of s sounds in the final stanza leaves the reader with
a soothing, peaceful feeling, one that has countered the chaos
of the opening stanzas.” Through the analysis of phonemic
content such as I am performing, I can provide critics with
quantifiable data upon which to base their claims. Further, the
possibility that phonemic accumulations are related to the ideas
expressed in the poems suggests strongly that a computer can
begin to interpret poetry: that it can distinguish passages with
expressions of intense, sincere love from passages with
expressions of self-doubt or insincerity. Phonemic analysis may
produce significant developments in the field of artificial
intelligence.