Reading poetry in invented languages

Prosodic-syntactic analysis of some cases

Abstract

Reading Poetry in Invented languages. Prosodic-Syntactic Analysis of Some Cases. In various linguistic domains the prosodic study of poetry has been conducted in different settings with independent methodologies and in recent years revealed the presence of a rich stylistic typology in the spoken version of this literary form. However, the encoding of rhythm and intonation in the reading of poetry in invented languages remains to be explored. This paper aims at analysing the link between prosody and syntax that emerges in the oral rendering of texts with such features. For this research, four texts were selected from the works of four different authors, both Italian and foreign, representative of fictional Italian-like language creation. Two readings of each text were collected, one male and one female, by professional actors. The VIP methodology (Colonna, 2021) was employed to provide a general framework and allowing to account for the relationship between the syntactic level and the constructions uttered reading aloud. Prosodic strategies adopted by different speakers were mainly examined at syntactically critical points. Although the corpus is quite limited, a qualitative analysis at a phonetic level suggested new ways for syntactic understanding and text comprehension and provided a valuable discriminating tool in some cases. Only a quantitative approach extended to a larger corpus – which we aim to develop in the future – would allow a broader picture of this fascinating research topic.