Advances in Humanities Research

Advances in Humanities Research

Vol. 3, 20 November 2023


Open Access | Article

Compositionality in Pablo Picasso’s Poetry

Enrique Mallen * 1
1 Sam Houston State University

* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Advances in Humanities Research, Vol. 3, 1-20
Published 20 November 2023. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by EWA Publishing
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Citation Enrique Mallen. Compositionality in Pablo Picasso’s Poetry. AHR (2023) Vol. 3: 1-20. DOI: 10.54254/2753-7080/3/2023015.

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

References

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Data Availability

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.

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Volume Title
ISBN (Print)
ISBN (Online)
Published Date
20 November 2023
Series
Advances in Humanities Research
ISSN (Print)
2753-7080
ISSN (Online)
2753-7099
DOI
10.54254/2753-7080/3/2023015
Copyright
20 November 2023
Open Access
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Copyright © 2023 EWA Publishing. Unless Otherwise Stated