The loss of poetic effects: From indeterminate to conventionalised meaning

Abstract

This study investigates the diachronic evolution of poetic figurative language and some of its aesthetic effects. It suggests that poetic expressions can lose their poetic force over time as they conventionalise through repetition. A hypothesis based on the concept of poetic effects developed in Relevance Theory (Pilkington, 2000; Sperber and Wilson, 1995 [1989]) and on the theory of semantic change (Traugott and Dasher, 2002) is proposed to explain this phenomenon. This hypothesis was successfully tested through three case studies, in which French idiomatic expressions that have originated in poetry were shown to have progressively lost their aesthetic power and to have become cliché phrases as they were gaining a clearer, more determinate and conventional meaning. The methodology makes use of various sources to determine the poetic power of an expression and its change through time: literary critiques, newspaper corpora, Google Ngram graphs, translations into foreign languages and date of appearance in the dictionaries.