On the Relation between the General Affective Meaning and the Basic
Sublexical, Lexical, and Inter-lexical Features of Poetic Texts - A Case Study
Using 57 Poems of H. M. Enzensberger
The literary genre of poetry is inherently related to the expression and
elicitation of emotion via both content and form. To explore the nature of
this affective impact at an extremely basic textual level, we collected
ratings on eight different general affective meaning scales—valence, arousal,
friendliness, sadness, spitefulness, poeticity, onomatopoeia, and liking—for
57 German poems (“die verteidigung der wölfe”) which the contemporary author
H. M. Enzensberger had labeled as either “friendly,” “sad,” or “spiteful.”
Following Jakobson's (1960) view on the vivid interplay of hierarchical text
levels, we used multiple regression analyses to explore the specific
influences of affective features from three different text levels (sublexical,
lexical, and inter-lexical) on the perceived general affective meaning of the
poems using three types of predictors: (1) Lexical predictor variables
capturing the mean valence and arousal potential of words; (2) Inter-lexical
predictors quantifying peaks, ranges, and dynamic changes within the lexical
affective content; (3) Sublexical measures of basic affective tone according
to sound-meaning correspondences at the sublexical level (see Aryani et al.,
2016). We find the lexical predictors to account for a major amount of up to
50% of the variance in affective ratings. Moreover, inter-lexical and
sublexical predictors account for a large portion of additional variance in
the perceived general affective meaning. Together, the affective properties of
all used textual features account for 43–70% of the variance in the affective
ratings and still for 23–48% of the variance in the more abstract aesthetic
ratings. In sum, our approach represents a novel method that successfully
relates a prominent part of variance in perceived general affective meaning in
this corpus of German poems to quantitative estimates of affective properties
of textual components at the sublexical, lexical, and inter-lexical level