Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

‘Simple as a fire’: Making sense of the non-standard poetic simile

‘Simple as a fire’: Making sense of the non-standard poetic simile AbstractOur topic is an under-theorized type of closed simile in which the ground represents a non-salient feature of the source term (e.g., as quiet as a weight, as opposed to a standard simile, e.g., as heavy as a weight). The non-standard simile introduces a semantic difficulty, a result of the unexpected mismatch between ground and source. Since they are highly prevalent in poetic texts there is special interest in investigating the ways subjects attempt to comprehend such similes. To that end, we have asked 62 subjects to interpret pairs of similes distinguished only by the salience of the ground. We identify 5 response types and find that these are unevenly distributed across the two simile types (standard and non-standard). The structural difference between the two kinds of similes, therefore, evokes different interpretational strategies. Additionally, we find that the non-standard simile entails a hit-or-miss potentiality, creating conditions for either an insightful interpretation or a rejection of any possibility of its coherent comprehension. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of Literary Semantics de Gruyter

‘Simple as a fire’: Making sense of the non-standard poetic simile

Tartakovsky, Roi; Shen, Yeshayahu
Journal of Literary Semantics , Volume 47 (2): 17 – Dec 19, 2018
Download PDF
17 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/de-gruyter/simple-as-a-fire-making-sense-of-the-non-standard-poetic-simile-wDGjVgtvC7

References (11)

Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
ISSN
1613-3838
eISSN
1613-3838
DOI
10.1515/jls-2018-2002
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

AbstractOur topic is an under-theorized type of closed simile in which the ground represents a non-salient feature of the source term (e.g., as quiet as a weight, as opposed to a standard simile, e.g., as heavy as a weight). The non-standard simile introduces a semantic difficulty, a result of the unexpected mismatch between ground and source. Since they are highly prevalent in poetic texts there is special interest in investigating the ways subjects attempt to comprehend such similes. To that end, we have asked 62 subjects to interpret pairs of similes distinguished only by the salience of the ground. We identify 5 response types and find that these are unevenly distributed across the two simile types (standard and non-standard). The structural difference between the two kinds of similes, therefore, evokes different interpretational strategies. Additionally, we find that the non-standard simile entails a hit-or-miss potentiality, creating conditions for either an insightful interpretation or a rejection of any possibility of its coherent comprehension.

Journal

Journal of Literary Semantics – de Gruyter

Published: Dec 19, 2018

There are no references for this article.