Parallelisms and deviations: two fundamentals of an aesthetics of poetic diction

Abstract

Poetic diction routinely involves two complementary classes of features: (i) parallelisms, i.e. repetitive patterns (rhyme, metre, alliteration, etc.) that enhance the predictability of upcoming words, and (ii) poetic deviations that challenge standard expectations/predictions regarding regular word form and order. The present study investigated how these two prediction-modulating fundamentals of poetic diction affect the cognitive processing and aesthetic evaluation of poems, humoristic couplets and proverbs. We developed quantitative measures of these two groups of text features. Across the three text genres, higher deviation scores reduced both comprehensibility and aesthetic liking whereas higher parallelism scores enhanced these. The positive effects of parallelism are significantly stronger than the concurrent negative effects of the features of deviation. These results are in accord with the hypothesis that art reception involves an interplay of prediction errors and prediction error minimization, with the latter paving the way for processing fluency and aesthetic liking.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives’.

Aesthetics and predictive processing: grounds and prospects of a fruitful encounter

“…The first part of the issue, entitled “General Issues”, gathers contributions that clarify the conceptual bases of the encounter between PP and aesthetics and expand it in new directions [ 98 , 142 , 148 , 149 ]. The three parts that follow—devoted to “Visual Art” [ 63 , 123 ], “Music” [ 102 , 132 , 133 ] and “Literature, Narrative and Cinema” [ 56 , 95 , 96 , 125 ] respectively—offer an articulate picture of the insights that PP can provide when applied to different art forms (including some that have so far been little or never explored from a PP perspective), and what in turn these art forms, when considered from a PP perspective, can tell us about our mental functioning. The last part, entitled “Responses and Critical Perspectives” contains papers that compare the PP picture of our aesthetic encounters with other leading proposals in the field and provide useful criticisms and indications for future research [ 64 , 107 , 108 ].…”

“…Third, PP also allows us to model the dynamics of our engagement (thanks to its Bayesian apparatus) and to connect these dynamics with known facts about brain function (thanks to its hypotheses about neural implementation). More of course will have to be said about how exactly 'predictions' are involved in specific cases, but the work done so far seems at least to suggest that the PP apparatus is plastic enough to be applied productively to a wide variety of artforms, including visual art [50,51,57,93], music [52,54], literature [53,94,95], cinema, [55,56,96] and games [97].…”