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The Verse-Line as a Whole Unit in Working Memory, Ease of Processing, and the Aesthetic Effects of Form

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 October 2014

Nigel Fabb
Nigel Fabb*
Affiliation:
University of Strathclyden.fabb@strath.ac.uk
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Extract

Verse is text which is divided into lines. In this paper I explore a psychological account of how verse is processed, and specifically the hypothesis that the text is processed line by line, such that each line is held as a whole sequence in the limited capacity of working memory. I will argue that because the line is processed in this way, certain low-level aesthetic effects are thereby produced, thus giving a partial explanation for why verse is often a highly valued type of verbal behaviour. The general goal is to address the question of what literary form is, from a psychological perspective, and how the textual presence and psychological processing of form can contribute to particular aspects of the aesthetic experience of verse.

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Papers
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Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 75: Philosophical Aesthetics and the Sciences of Art , October 2014 , pp. 29 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2014 

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References

1 Thanks to Alan Baddeley, Rip Cohen, Greg Currie, Graham Hitch, Jonathan Hope, Elspeth Jajdelska, Christian Obermeier, Sinead Rhodes, Gary Thoms, Barbara Tillmann, Stefano Versace, and two anonymous reviewers.

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17 In a corpus of recorded English poetry (54 poems), consisting of 1155 metrical lines: 59% of the lines are longer than 3 seconds, 40% are longer than 3.5 seconds, and 26% are longer than 4 seconds. See Fabb, Nigel, ‘There is no psychological limit on the duration of metrical lines in performance: against Turner and Pöppel’, International Journal of Literary Linguistics (2013)Google Scholar. This paper argues against a durational constraint on the line proposed by Turner, Frederick and Pöppel, Ernst, ‘The Neural Lyre: Poetic Meter, the Brain, and Time’, Poetry 142 (1983), 277–307Google Scholar.

18 Very few metres allow more than 15 syllables to the line, hence no more than 15 words. The major exception is the metres of Classical Sanskrit, as cited earlier; note however that the longest line quoted here is 21 syllables by metre, but only five and a half words long, because of the extremely long words of the language.

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