Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics

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.

*** The talk will be delivered in person (MFF UK, Malostranské nám. 25, 4th floor, room S1) and will be streamed via Zoom. For details how to join the Zoom meeting, please write to sevcikova et ufal.mff.cuni.cz ***