Computational Limericks (blog summary)

Since Colin didn't post his blog summary, here's the one from ENGL 300-1, done by Heather Mormino.

Responses are due on Wednesday, Nov. 5th, by class time.
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Lessard and Levison begin the article by stating that this topic may be frivolous, but it could a good case can be made for the importance and indeed the centrality of the problems that they discuss further in the article on both theoretical and practical problems. They state that people are interested in the underlying principles of what it taken as the essential component of our humanity: humor.

We may have all heard of limericks, but what exactly is a limerick? Well, in the article the authors say that a limerick is the midway between a pun and a joke. What constitutes a limerick to most people is a five-line poem with an aabba rhyme, scheme, an anapestic metre, and nine syllables on lines one, two and five, and six syllables on lines three and four. However, this is subject to change as the rhyme scheme is not limited to aabba.

Lessard and Levison then start to discuss rhyme. Two phonological sequences (words, sequences of words, lines) are said to rhyme if their final stressed syllables share the same nucleus and coda. Everyboday knows that for most poems rhyme is an essetial piece. So we take from these two section of the article that a limerick is a rhyming joke.

Now we get into metre: Once a rhyme scheme has been determined, the construction of each line requires that a sequence of lexical items be aligned, culminating in the rhyming word, which contains the correct number of syllables and whose metrical structure follows the pattern determined for the limerick under construction. So now we decide that a limerick is a rhyming joke that has a certain rhythm based from its metre. The metre is the flow of the rhyme. Think of how you read a poem and the specific pattern we use in our heads.

For discussion: Do you know any (class appropriate) limericks? Do you think you could make one up on your own? Would you teach limericks to your class, and if so would you mix it in with poetry since we know that a limerick is somewhat of a rhyming poem?