The Pragmatics of Enjambment
Enjambment, the continuation of a syntactic unit across a poetic line break, is a common poetic device whose effects on interpretation have received limited attention from a cognitive pragmatic perspective. This thesis investigates enjambment theoretically and experimentally within a relevance-theoretic framework. It explores how line breaks that disrupt syntactic and semantic completion may function as ostensive pragmatic cues that attract attention and guide readers’ inferential processing.
Drawing on literary critical descriptions of enjambment as producing seemingly contradictory effects such as suspense or tension as well as movement or flow, the thesis argues that such effects can be understood as fluctuations in processing effort during poetic reading. Building on previous relevance-theoretic accounts of literary interpretation and poetic effects, it develops an empirically informed approach to enjambment. The theoretical account is illustrated through a relevance-theoretic close reading of Lucille Clifton’s poem daughters and tested experimentally using a self-paced reading task comparing total reading times for enjambed and non-enjambed poetic lines. The results show that enjambed lines are associated with a small but statistically significant increase in total reading time, consistent with increased overall processing effort.
This thesis proposes that enjambment attracts attention and modulates inferential processing by prompting readers to resolve a tension between pausing at the end of a poetic line and continuing forward to complete the syntactic or semantic structure before integrating meaning across the line break.
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