Measuring the basic affective tone of poems via phonological saliency and iconicity.

Abstract

We investigate the relation between general affective meaning and the use of particular phonological segments in poems, presenting a novel quantitative measure to assess the basic affective tone of a text based on foregrounded phonological units and their iconic affective properties. The novel method is applied to the volume of German poems "verteidigung der wölfe" (defense of the wolves) by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who categorized these 57 poems as friendly, sad, or spiteful. Our approach examines the relation between the phonological inventory of the texts to both the author's affective categorization and readers' perception of the poems-assessed by a survey study. Categorical comparisons of basic affective tone reveal significant differences between the 3 groups of poems in accordance with the labels given by the author as well as with the affective rating scores given by readers. Using multiple regression, we show our sublexical measures of basic affective tone to account for a considerable part of variance (9.5%Ϫ20%) of ratings on different emotion scales. We interpret this finding as evidence that the iconic properties of foregrounded phonological units contribute significantly to the poems' emotional perception-potentially reflecting an intentional use of phonology by the author. Our approach represents a first independent statistical quantification of the basic affective tone of texts.

On Elementary Affective Decisions: To Like Or Not to Like, That Is the Question

“…“A nice line” is an often-used expression for phrases or sentences that, like the political slogan “I like Ike,” apply the two major principles of the poetic genre, i.e., the prominence of sound properties and more or less subtly expressed or perceived affective meanings, in an affectively and aesthetically appealing way (Jakobson, 1960; Schrott and Jacobs, 2011; Aryani et al, 2016). “What are men to rocks and mountains?” (Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice) or “At the still point, there the dance is” (T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets”) are examples for nice lines from novels and poetry.…”

“…A recent example for an attempt to predict the liking of entire poems by quantifying the euphony-eusemy nexus typical for poetry (i.e., phonological iconicity ; Jakobson and Waugh, 1979/2002) is given in Aryani et al (2016). The authors used the EMOPHON software (Aryani et al, 2013) to obtain quantitative estimates of the basic affective tone of poems from Enzensberger’s (1957/1981) collection “verteidigung der wölfe” (in defense of the wolves).…”

“…The 20% of variance in valence ratings accounted for in the 57 poems by this measure strongly suggests that the iconic properties of foregrounded phonological units are a co-determinant of liking. While having shown effects of phonological iconicity on poetry reception is no news per se , the quantification of the distinctive features and the fact that on top of liking ratings the EMOPHON software also allowed to predict specific emotional responses, such as “spitefulness ratings” ( R 2 lin = 0.22; see Table 2 in Aryani et al, 2016), makes the study a promising model for future approaches.…”

Mimological Reveries? Disconfirming the Hypothesis of Phono-Emotional Iconicity in Poetry

“…We opted for a more contemporary corpus, because previous empirical research on phono-emotional iconicity has largely refrained from using contemporary poems (see Schmidtke et al, 2014, for a review; for an analysis of poems from the twentieth century, see Aryani et al, 2016). Consequently, all poems, except E. Mörike's Er ist's (1829) and F. Nietzsche's Vereinsamt (1882), were written in the twentieth century.…”

“…Recent (psycho-)linguistic studies have suggested that phonological iconicity is a property of languages that should be acknowledged as an important addition to the principle of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign (Perniss et al, 2010; Myers-Schulz et al, 2013; Perniss and Vigliocco, 2014; for an overview see Hinton et al, 2006; Schmidtke et al, 2014). In particular, poetry has often served as a testing ground for the hypothesis of an “inmost, natural similarity association between sound and meaning” (Jakobson and Waugh, 1979/2002, p. 182; see also Valery, 1958; Jakobson, 1960; Fónagy, 1961; Tsur, 1992; Whissell, 2002, 2011; Pope, 2010; Schrott and Jacobs, 2011; Aryani et al, 2016). Specifically, two studies by Albers (2008) and Auracher et al (2010) provided empirical support for the hypothesis of phono-emotional iconicity in poetry.…”