Monday, 18 November 2024 – The Unnatural Language of Poetic Meters, or Why I Am Scared of SystematicityMonday

Zveřejněno: 13. 11. 2024

Artjoms Šeļa (Institute of Czech Literature, Czech Academy of Sciences)

While poetic meters are shaped and constrained by language, they also are external to it. No one speaks to their coworkers in iambic pentameter. Meters function as cultural technologies, imposing a systematic pattern on a language that is itself already full of structured relationships. The interaction between these two systems leads to predictable, yet often unintuitive, effects at various textual levels. In large corpora, these effects accumulate into strong statistical regularities, becoming a major source of linguistic variation. In this talk, I will demonstrate how different meters distinctly shape seemingly arbitrary feature distributions in Czech, German, and Russian corpora. I argue that these effects can be beneficial for meter classification tasks, but also they introduce dangerous confounds in large-scale computational literary analysis, limiting our ability to draw inferences about poetry at the corpus level.

Termín: 14:00

Místo konání: MFF UK, Malostranské nám. 25, 4th floor, room S1

Více informací: https://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/events/unnatural-language-poetic-meters-or-why-i-am-scared-systematicity