Sound Symbolism in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Evidence of Dramatic Tension in the Interplay of Harsh and Gentle Sounds
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper addresses the role of meaningful sounds in poetic communication. A sound symbolic system (Whissell, 2000) was employed to score Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets in terms of the percentage of Harsh (e.g., sh, oo, r, k, p) and Gentle (e.g., l, long e, th, eh, m) sounds in each line. Significant differences in the employment of emotional sounds across lines suggest that the structure of the sonnets is affectively dramatic. Four stages unfold across three quatrains and a couplet. These are the establishment of the problem (lines 1-4; excess of Harsh sounds), its enlargement (lines 5-8; greater dominance of Harsh sounds), multiple emotional reversals (lines 9-12; alternating ascendance of Gentle and Harsh sounds), and a closing coda (lines 13, 14; an echo of the sounds in the first quatrain). In the order of their publication, which has been touted as potentially autobiographical, the sonnets provide a picture of repeated swings between Gentle and Harsh emotional extremes. Individual sonnets critically recognized for their distinctive emotional tone display the appropriate preponderance of Gentle or Harsh sounds.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".