Rhythm in verse

Abstract

Abstract This paper on rhythm is an adaptation of the semiotic research on rhythm in versified language presented as one of the seven types of poetic iconicity in Chapter 5 of The Communicative Mind: A Linguistic Exploration of Conceptual Integration and Meaning Construction (L. Brandt 2013) entitled “Effects of poetic enunciation: Seven types of iconicity”. Defined by the linebreak, poetic language use engenders distinctive interpretive affordances, some of which manifest themselves as emphatically iconic sign relations contributing to the expressive whole of a text. In “Effects of poetic enunciation”, I explore syntactic, semantic, phonetic, rhythmic and rhetorical aspects of the phenomenon of semiotic iconicity, and its counterpart aniconicity, in language characterized by an intentionally (line)broken syntax and contribute a systematic account of the different types of semiotic iconicity relations, understood as figural or diagrammatic similarity relations – or, conversely, potent dissimilarity relations, i.e. aniconicity – between expressive means and semantic content. Rhythmic iconicity is the fifth type of iconicity in this typology.