The Dance of Pauses in Poetry Declamation

Abstract

In poetry declamation, the appropriate use of prosody to cause pleasure is essential. Among the prosodic parameters, pause is one of the most effective to engage the listeners and provide them with a pleasant experience. The declamation of three poems in two varieties of Portuguese by ten Brazilian Portuguese (BP) speakers and ten European Portuguese (EP) speakers, balanced for gender, was used as a corpus for evaluating the degree of pleasantness by listeners from the same language variety. The distributions of pause duration and inter-pause interval (IPI) both varied greatly across the subjects, being the main source of variability and strongly right-tailed. The evaluation of the degree of pleasantness revealed that pause duration predicts degree of pleasantness in EP, whereas IPI predicts degree of pleasantness in BP. Reciters perform a kind of complex “dance”, where sonority between pauses is favored in BP and pause duration in EP.

Cultural differences of gaps and overlapping speech in political interviews

“…However, our analysis revealed that languages featuring shorter gaps do not necessarily have longer overlaps (Question #4). Interestingly, this trend was reversed in the case of BP, a language distinguished by longer gaps, extended pauses (as also discussed in [16]), and longer instances of overlap. Additionally, our investigation unveiled that the duration of overlaps displays a distinct pattern of language grouping, potentially indicating a divergent pace in the communication process, distinct from the patterns observed in pauses and gaps, and this is seemingly the case of BP, in particular.…”

Towards a phonetic history of the voices of Spanish poets

“…77-134) and Colonna & Romano (2023). For the Ibero-Romance languages, in particular, see and Barbosa (2022Barbosa ( , 2023. 2 Among the works on the topic of voice in Spanish authors, see Mistrorigo (2018).…”