IMPACT OF METRICAL PROSODY ON PERFORMANCES

Abstract

This thesis is about testing Frederick Turner and Ernst Pöppel’s claim that suggest
metrical poem tends to measure three seconds in terms of psychological limit
when it is performed aloud. The objective of the study is to present metrical
poems as the new data to test their claim by using corpus analysis. Hereby, the
researcher uses publicly available 28 read-aloud poems from poetryoutloud.org
by using Praat to find the duration of each metrical line. The findings indicate that
there are 18 English metrical poems with 314 lines in total, supported by metrical
tree analysis, meanwhile there are 10 poems which are free verse and found that
1) most lines have iamb feet, 2) 10 of the metrical pattern of the poems are iambic
pentameter, whereas others are in diverse meter, 3) there is no psychological limit
on the duration of metrical lines in performance as the researcher only founds
62.73% that fit to the 3 seconds of temporal window based on the analysis in the
corpus of 314 metrical lines. This study has shown what Frederick Turner and
Ernst Pöppel claim is not methodologically proven.