Poetic Form Shapes Meaning: Meter & Topics Relations in Czech, German, and Russian 19th-20th Century Poetry

• In Event: Computational Poetics

Abstract

This study formally addresses the expected connection between poetic meter and it’s meaning - a hypothesis first explored for modern verse traditions in Slavic versification studies (O. Brik, R. Jakobson, K. Taranovskii) and named “the semantic halo of meter” (M. Gasparov). Since metrical forms are powerful mnemonic device that sets limitations on language (D. Rubin), study argues that metre-meaning association should be present across different modern poetic traditions, however with varied strength of this association.
To verify this assumption and test for “halo effect” across languages, study utilizes LDA topic modeling. Three language-specific models were built for Russian, Czech and German poetic corpora that were metrically annotated. LDA allowed to represent each single poem as a probability distribution over a finite number of topics, so that poems within each model would be expressed in one semantic space. Profiles of topic’s aggregated probabilities with different sampling strategies were then derived for distinct metrical forms, which allowed to calculate distances between semantic profiles and verify the resulting picture against previous studies.
Results show that different metrical forms do accumulate specific semantic traditions: random sample of Russian Iambic tetrameters tend to be “closer” to another Russian sample of Iambic tetrameters, than to trochaic pentameters, according to topic representations. The formal modeling of meter-semantics relations allows to proceed further and argue about strength and the capacity of the “halo effect” over time while being independent of corpus language.

Authors

• Petr Plechac, Institute of Czech Literature CAS (Czech Republic)

• Artjom Shelya, Institute of Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland) / U of Tartu (Estonia)