Poetic effects and visuospatial form: A relevance-theoretic perspective

This article examines the potential cognitive-pragmatic effects of line divisions within poetic text from the perspective of relevance theory. The article posits that line divisions can function as perceptual inputs to pragmatic processing, which encourage readers to inferentially process certain elements of a given poetic text's linguistically encoded content in a more contextually exhaustive manner, than likely would have been the case had the text been arranged upon the page in a less visuospatially fragmented form. The article contends that such levels of processing may give rise to arrays of additional cognitive-pragmatic effects of a communicatively weak and for some readers poetic nature. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.