Semi-rhymes, similarity, and phonological knowledge

Abstract

This is a study of the judgments of relative similarity implicit in
the preference for certain types of semi-rime (SR; aka half rime).
The poetic tradition studied is Romanian literary poetry from the
late 19th to mid 20th century.  The starting assumption is that
the poets' observed preference for one SR type over another reflects
their judgment that the better SR's involve more similar strings and
thus a rhyming pair closer to perfect identity. Relative similarity
will be reflected in correspondence rankings: if Corr1 >> Corr2
(where Corr1 and Corr2 are distinct correspondence constraints
evaluating the identity between the rhyme domains of two lines) then
a pair of lines violating Corr1 will be, all else equal, less
harmonic and thus dispreferred to a pair violating Corr2. The
immediate goal of the project is  to determine whether changes of
context induce different evaluations of phonological similarity and,
if so, whether the different evaluations of similarity are tied to
phonetic, context-dependent differences in the realization of the
relevant features or to other factors. But the ultimate goal is to
understand the sources of the knowledge shared by poets and their
audience that some correspondence constraints outrank others.

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