An analysis of Emily Dickinson’s poems from the perspective of metrical phonology
Jeong, Sunwoo (Seoul National University, Assistant Professor)
Abstract
Metrical phonology deals with conventional phonological rules that govern verse
language. Hayes and MacEachern (1998) and Kiparsky (2006) demonstrate that
constraint-based OT frameworks can be fruitfully applied to model the metrical
phonology of quatrains, a widely used verse tradition in English. However, the
application of their analyses was restricted to musical quatrains. This paper extends
the partially-ranked constraint analysis of quatrains in Kiparsky (2006) to literary
data, namely, the poems of Emily Dickinson. It demonstrates that with some
adjustments involving the addition of a well-motivated metrical constraint, the
extended analysis can successfully capture not only the typology of attested quatrain
types in Dickinson’s work, but also their relative frequencies. The emerging
discussion provides a linguistic perspective on how artistic innovations can emerge
from a well-regulated metrical grammar.
Keywords
metrics, metrical phonology, Emily Dickinson, partially ordered constraint ranking,
Optimality Theory