[Hanna P]

Just wanted to comment on this passage I got caught up in:

“One of the most notable features of writing is that it nearly exclusively encodes the verbal component of the message alone: the prosody is ignored. This feature seems to be true of all the writing systems known around the world. Because of this it is sometimes said that written language is impoverished with respect to spoken language insofar as it can express only part of the message.“ p. 30

Why don’t metre, stress, rhythm, pauses, falls, rises, quality of phonemes etc in literature not count? Jurafsky even seems to oppose poetic patterns to rhythm in speech (p. 262)! I would have thought the complete opposite of what Taylor’s saying — the significant thing that world literature has in common here is the importance of metrical poetry, which can emerge many centuries before prose in anything beyond record keeping, and continues to be part of oral tradition. Yet he’s more willing to classify happy-face emoticons as ‘an attempt to encode affective prosody’ than rhythmic writing! Just imagine ’to be or not to be’ rewritten to the metre of humpty dumpty — it would have an even greater change of tone than repeating it while laughing out loud.

A synthesiser reading poetry, or even literary prose or political speeches, wouldn’t sound quite right, right? But poetic metre shows that a human reader wouldn’t simply be improvising the way they would them them. Maybe a text processing step to identify textual prosody and repetitions would be able to lead onto more melodious output.

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