Sound Patterning: a pragmatic perspective

Modern linguistics holds that sounds have no intrinsic meaning; it is only in combination as words that the phonemes of a language come to be associated with meanings, and this association is conventional, not natural. If this is true, the fact that poets take the trouble to arrange sounds to form certain patterns in their poetry seems to be contradictory. This research addresses this contradiction and offers a unified theoretical account of the cognitive processes at work when we read and interpret sound-patterned poetry. Attention is given to segmental patterns such as alliteration and rhyme, as well as prosodic features of rhythm and metre.
The account uses a spreading activation model of lexical access, along with relevance theory, a cognitive pragmatic approach to communication. It also draws on phoneticians' accounts of strictly coded and more variable associations of linguistic prosodic features (such as pitch frequency) with meaning, and psychological work on synaesthesia. The central argument, deriving from the relevance theory notion of poetic effects, is that literary sound patterning generally conveys non-coded, diffuse and non-propositional impressions, and the gathering of these impressions is facilitated by the process of lexical access along with a latent capacity to associate sound and meaning.