Colloquium talk by Kristin Hanson (UC Berkeley)

What's Elision For? Aesthetic Implications of the Syllable Structure of Shakespeare's Sonnets

Department Colloquium
Monday, April 6, 2009
4:00 PM to 5:30 PM
Dwinelle 182

All meters of English poetry which impose constraints on syllable count also permit variation in syllable count.   Kiparsky (1977) distinguishes two sources of such variation which are formally distinct. "Metrical rules" are special to meter, expressing possible mappings between the phonological structure of language and a metrical template. "Prosodic rules", in contrast, even though they may describe language used only in poetry, are just phonological rules, defining possible variant interpretations of phonological structure itself. All the traditionally recognized rules of elision in English poetry, which permit two syllables to count as one, are of the latter type. For example, deletion of an unstressed vowel adjacent to another vowel permits a word like "flower" to count as either one syllable or two (Kiparsky 1977). In the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare's sonnets, then, a meter defined by (in addition to other properties) ten alternating weak and strong positions and a metrical rule mapping exactly one syllable into each position, it can be mapped into either one position or two:

   Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gathered (124.4)
                                                   \_/
                       w   s w    s     w    s      w    s w   s   <>

   In this talk, I want to show how in his sonnets Shakespeare uses this entirely straightforward metrical rule -- which crucially is not the one he uses in his plays -- to extravagantly but always phonologically plausibly explore the possibilities of elision, and in so doing produces a veritable treatise on syllable structure.    He also, of course, produces a meditation on solitude and union, identity and reproduction, sameness and difference; but these are all quite literally versions of the same problem elision raises. The sonnets thus show precisely how the linguistic repetition which Jakobson (1960) identifies as the "empirical linguistic criterion of the poetic function" achieves the aesthetic end Shklóvsky (1924) identifies, of defamiliarizing our own perceptual processes -- in this case, the parsing of syllables.