McGill University, Montréal, QC, Canada, Canada.
Cognition. 2010 Nov;117(2):166-75. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2010.08.007.
Identical rhymes (right/write, attire/retire) are considered satisfactory and even artistic in French poetry but are considered unsatisfactory in English. This has been a consistent generalization over the course of centuries, a surprising fact given that other aspects of poetic form in French were happily applied in English. This paper puts forward the hypothesis that this difference is not merely one of poetic tradition, but is grounded in the distinct ways in which information-structure affects prosody in the two languages. A study of rhyme usage in poetry and a perception experiment confirm that native speakers' intuitions about rhyming in the two languages indeed differ, and a further perception experiment supports the hypothesis that this fact is due to a constraint on prosody that is active in English but not in French. The findings suggest that certain forms of artistic expression in poetry are influenced, and even constrained, by more general properties of a language.
在法文中，押韵完全相同的词（right/write、attire/retire）被认为是令人满意的，甚至是具有艺术性的，但在英文中则不然。这是几个世纪以来的一贯概括，考虑到法文中其他诗体形式都被愉快地应用于英文，这是一个令人惊讶的事实。本文提出了这样一种假设，即这种差异不仅仅是诗歌传统的差异，而是源于信息结构以不同的方式影响两种语言韵律的事实。对诗歌中押韵使用情况的研究和感知实验证实，母语为英语和法语的人对这两种语言中押韵的直觉确实存在差异，而进一步的感知实验支持了这样一种假设，即这一事实是由于英语中存在一种对韵律的限制，而这种限制在法语中并不存在。这些发现表明，诗歌中某些形式的艺术表达受到语言更普遍属性的影响，甚至受到限制。
