What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive?: The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception

Sound and Meaning: The Roman Jakobson Series in Linguistics and Poetics

by Reuven Tsur

Poets, academics, and those who simply speak a language are subject to mysterious intuitions about the perceptual qualities and emotional symbolism of the sounds of speech. Such intuitions are Reuven Tsur’s point of departure in this investigation into the expressive effect of sound patterns, addressing questions of great concern for literary theorists and critics as well as for linguists and psychologists.
Research in recent decades has established two distinct types of aural a nonspeech mode, in which the acoustic signals are received in the manner of musical sounds or natural noises; and a speech mode, in which acoustic signals are excluded from awareness and only an abstract phonetic category is perceived. Here, Tsur proposes a third type of speech perception, a poetic mode in which some part of the acoustic signal becomes accessible, however faintly, to consciousness.
Using Roman Jakobson’s model of childhood acquisition of the phonological system, Tsur shows how the nonreferential babbling sounds made by infants form a basis for aesthetic valuation of language. He tests the intersubjective and intercultural validity of various spatial and tactile metaphors for certain sounds. Illustrating his insights with reference to particular literary texts, Tsur considers the relative merits of cognitive and psychoanalytic approaches to the emotional symbolism of speech sounds.

Genres: Linguistics

188 pages, Paperback

First published January 31, 1992

About the author

Reuven Tsur is Professor Emeritus of Hebrew Literature at Tel Aviv University, served several terms as the director of the Katz Research Institute for Hebrew Literature. He has been visiting professor at the Hebrew University, at Columbia University, and at the University of Lancaster. He participated in an indefinite number of international conferences in semiotics, comparative literature, cognitive studies, literature and psychology, linguistics, and empirical aesthetics. He has been research fellow at the University of Southampton and at Yale University. He was introduced into the mysteries of speech research at the Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, and at the University of Lancaster. He is Vice President for the Middle East of the International Association for Empirical Aesthetics, and a member of the editorial board of Empirical Studies of the Arts, Psyart — a hyperlink e-journal, Cognitive Semiotics, Journal of Literary Theory. and Versification: An Electronic Journal of Literary Prosody, as well as of the advisory board of the URL Literature, Cognition & the Brain.

He has a BA in English and Hebrew Literature from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and a D.Phil. in English from the University of Sussex.

Reuven Tsur has developed a theory of Cognitive Poetics, and applied it to rhyme, sound symbolism, poetic rhythm, metaphor, poetry and altered states of consciousness, period style, genre, archetypal patterns, translation theory, the implied critic's decision style, and critical competence. In his books and articles he applied his theories to English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, and Hebrew poetry, ranging from the Bible, through the eleventh, sixteenth and seventeenth century, to the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century. His Perception-Oriented Theory of Metre includes a theory of the rhythmical performance of poetry which, after 25 years of agonising search, he found a way to submit to an instrumental investigation. He has recently finished this instrumental research and published its results (see below the list of Major Publications. His book Poetic Rhythm, Structure and Performance (1998) has been published by Peter Lang). Since the publication of this book he has been applying its method to a constantly-growing corpus, exploring additional aspects of vocal performance.