creators_name: Tsur, Reuven
editors_name: Holland, Norman
type: journale
datestamp: 2003-10-18
lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:55:22
metadata_visibility: show
title: Phonetic Cues and Dramatic Function 
Artistic Recitation of Metered Speech
ispublished: pub
subjects: comp-sci-lang
subjects: appl-cog-psy
subjects: psy-ling
subjects: percep-cog-psy
subjects: ling-prag
subjects: comp-sci-speech
subjects: ling-phono
full_text_status: public
keywords: Richard III; expressive function of vocal style; poetic rhythm; performance; Simon Russel Beale; Iván Fónagy; Stress maxima in weak position; redundancy; conflicting cues; overdetermination;
note: This is a paper in Cognitive Poetics, and does not fit into anyone of the Cogprint Categories.
abstract: This article attempts a brief synthesis of two of my research areas: sound symbolism and poetic rhythm, focussed on Simon Russel Beale's performance of Gloucester's first soliloquy in Richard III. It explores three structural relationships between phoneti c cues and their effects: redundancy (when several phonetic cues combine to the same effect); conflicting cues (which serve to convey conflicting prosodic effects by the same stretch of speech); and overdetermination (when one phonetic cue serves to conve y a variety of unrelated -- e.g., phonological, rhythmical and expressive -- effects). Iván Fónagy speaks of dual coding of phonetic cues; the same cues convey phonological and emotive information. This article proposes "triple coding": the same cues conv ey phonological, emotive and rhythmic information. 

The expanded version concerns two instances of stress maxima in weak positions in  Gloucester's soliloquy, performed by an outstanding British actor. One  of them is the least performable kind, and this is sofar my only  chance for studying it. The expansion attempts to explore a methodological innovation too: The audio version of the  Merriam-Webster Dictionary offers recordings of the entries by highly trained speakers, to which the  artistic reading can be compared. It may serve as a standard from which the artistic recital deviates. But this suggested to me an additional, completely unexpected possibility as well. When Cleanth Brooks speaks of irony, he  means "the kind of qualification which the various  elements in a context receive from the context". I suddenly realised that this allowed me to explore the kind of qualification which certain intonation contours receive from the  context.
.e
date: 2002-09
date_type: published
publication: PsyArt: An Online Journal for Psychological Study of the Arts
refereed: TRUE
referencetext: Barney, Tom (1990) "The Forms of Enjambment". University of Lancaster unpublished MA dissertation. 

Chatman, Seymour (1965) A Theory of Meter. The Hague: Mouton. 

Chatman, Seymour (1966) "On the 'Intonational Fallacy'", QJS 52: 283286. 

Cooper, C. W. and L.B. Meyer (1960) The Rhythmic Structure of Music. Chicago: Chicago UP. 

Fónagy, Iván (1971) "The Functions of Vocal Style", in Seymour Chatman (ed.), Literary Style: A Symposium. London: Oxford UP. 159174. 

Halle, Morris and Samuel Jay Keyser (1966) "Chaucer and the Study of Prosody", College English 28: 187219. 

Knowles, Gerry (1991) "Prosodic Labelling: The Problem of Tone Group Boundaries", in Stig Johannson and Anna-Brita Stenström (eds.), English Computer
Corpora. Selected Papers and Research Guide. (Topics in English Linguistics 3) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 149163. 

Preminger, Alex and T. V. F. Brogan (1993) The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton: Princeton UP. 

Tsur, Reuven (1977) A Perception-Oriented Theory of M etre. Tel Aviv: The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics.

Tsur, Reuven (1992)What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive: The Poetic Mode of Speech-Perception. Durham N. C.: Duke UP.

Reuven Tsur (1997a) "Poetic Rhythm: Performance Patterns and their Acoustic Correlates". Versification: An Electronic Journal Devoted to Literary Prosody.
http://staff.washington.edu/versif/backissues/vol1/essays/tsur.html

Tsur, Reuven (1997b) "To Be Or Not To Be -- That is the Rhythm: A Cognitive-Empirical Study of Poetry in the Theatre". Assaph -- Studies in Theatre 13:
95-122 

Tsur, Reuven (1998) Poetic Rhythm: Structure and Performance -- An Empirical Study in Cognitive Poetics. Bern: Peter Lang.

Wellek, René & Austin Warren (1956) Theory of Literature. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. 

Recorded Readings
Beale, Simon Russel et al. reading William Shakespeare: Great Speeches and Soliloquies. Naxos AudioBooks Na 20 1512. 

The Marlowe Society and Professional Players reading Shakespeare: The Sonnets. Argo ZPR 254. 

citation:   Tsur, Reuven  (2002) Phonetic Cues and Dramatic Function Artistic Recitation of Metered Speech.  [Journal (On-line/Unpaginated)]     
document_url: http://cogprints.org/3235/2/Phonetic_cuesintuit__addit.html