Sound patterns in poetry
LING 195
Subject & Catalog Number
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Course Information
Description
This course examines the phonological structure of verse across three thousand years of the world's poetic traditions. We approach poetry as linguists, pattern-finding and puzzle-solving in the realms of meter, rhyme, alliteration, musical text-setting, phonaesthesia, and language games. We seek not only to describe such patterns, but also to explain them, grounding poets' metrical behavior in phonological theory and cognitive science. Modern metrics is informed by phonological theory, but the converse also holds: Poetry, being a kind of natural laboratory in which composers exploit, explore, and play with prosody, sheds light on questions of phonological theory. Prerequisite: A linguistics course or permission of the instructor; students should be prepared to engage with phonetic transcription and formal linguistic rules and constraints; the emphasis is data analysis (often of unfamiliar languages), not traditional prescriptions or literary interpretation."
School
Faculty of Arts & Sciences
Credits
4
Cross Reg
Available for Harvard Cross Registration
Department
Linguistics
Course Component
Seminar
General Education
N/A
Quantitative Reasoning with Data
N/A
Divisional Distribution
Arts and Humanities
Course Level
For Undergraduate and Graduate Students
