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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2021

Automatic enjambment detection as a new source of evidence in Spanish versification

Résumé

We present software to automatically identify enjambment (and its type) in Spanish. Traditionally, enjambment is described as a device whereby no syntactic pause occurs at the end of a poetry line, splitting a phrase across two lines. Most definitions highlight the conflict between syntactic and metrical units, yielding stylistic effects like double interpretations. In Spanish versification, Quilis (1964) performed poetry reading experiments, characterizing enjambment as a device occurring only when very cohesive syntactic units, which it would be unnatural to interrupt, are split across lines. Spang (1983) noted that splitting verbs and their subject or object across two lines also triggers (softer) enjambment-like effects. These characterizations are still considered current, but some points in them are debated. To systematically gather evidence on enjambment, we created a Natural Language Processing-based system that automatically detects and types enjambments as characterized above. For evaluation, we manually annotated a reference corpus. We consider system results satisfactory; F1 varied depending on enjambment type and poems’ period. We are not aware of large-sample enjambment studies across periods, literary movements, or versification types in Spanish, or other languages. Automatic detection can provide quantitative evidence for questions in verse theory, e.g.: To what an extent is enjambment used differently in free verse vs. traditional versification? Applying the system to 3,750 sonnets covering four centuries is shedding light on unclear points in the definition of enjambment. The system finds line-pairs formally fitting the description of enjambment, but that, upon human validation, we’d consider borderline cases, given other stylistic factors, e.g. hyperbaton. Conversely, our annotators are sometimes surprised that certain line-pairs are not considered enjambed in the typology. Automatic identification of many examples, plus expert validation, is helping towards a more nuanced redefinition of enjambment. An online user-interface is at http://prf1.org/anja/index and a command-line version is at https://bitbucket.org/pruizf/anja_public
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Dates et versions

hal-03255481 , version 1 (09-06-2021)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-03255481 , version 1

Citer

Clara I Martínez Cantón, Pablo Ruiz Fabo, Elena Gonzalez-Blanco, Thierry Poibeau. Automatic enjambment detection as a new source of evidence in Spanish versification. Bories, Anne-Sophie; Purnelle, Gérald; Marchal, Hugues. Plotting Poetry: On Mechanically Enhanced Reading, Presses Universitaires de Liège, 2021, 978-2-87562-280-8. ⟨hal-03255481⟩
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