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Compositionality in Pablo Picasso’s Poetry
- 1 Sam Houston State University
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Abstract
Pablo Picasso’s poetry expands the expressive power of language through syntactic mechanisms provided in natural grammar. His poems often consist of adjunct phrases, following a technique that recalls his cubist collages. The relation between the nuclei of those phrasal constituents as they come in contact remains open, so that readers are free to establish multidirectional semantic associations between them. His poetry is primarily word-oriented. As Picasso once stated, he wanted to compose his poems with “a palette of words,” leaving those words free “to fight it out among themselves” to attain any possible meaning. Such a combinatorial approach to language could be interpreted from the perspective of “linear grammars” as proposed by Culicover and Jackendoff, Jackendoff and Wittenberg and Culicover.
Keywords
parataxis, adjuncts, apposition, compositionality
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Cite this article
Mallen,E. (2023). Compositionality in Pablo Picasso’s Poetry. Advances in Humanities Research,3,1-20.
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