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Mixing pleasure and beauty: positive aesthetic experience in Old English poetry

Paper · 2020 · Francisco Javier Minaya Gómez

Summary

The paper asks how Old English poetry puts beauty and aesthetic pleasure into words. It focuses on whether descriptions praise the qualities of the admired thing itself or the feelings of the person who perceives it. Minaya Gómez studied 23 Old English lexical items with positive aesthetic meaning, drawn from vocabulary for appearance, moral qualities and pleasant personal experience. Using Old English thesauri, corpora and software, he built a database of attestations from the poetic corpus. Each occurrence was annotated with its poem (context) and neighbouring words (cotext). It was also tagged for the kind of evaluation involved: sensory, cognitive or behavioural. The theoretical framing comes from appraisal-based models of aesthetic emotion, chiefly Scherer, Juslin and Menninghaus et al. The statistics point to two routes for describing beauty. Appearance words lean toward an objective account of the thing. Pleasant-experience words lean toward the subject's reaction. Religious poems often combine the two, describing spiritual matters in bodily, sensory terms. The study matters because it shows that cultural standards of beauty can be partly reconstructed from how a language expresses evaluation.

Key points

  • The dataset covers 23 positive aesthetic emotion lexemes in the Old English poetic corpus. Examples discussed include fæger, cyme and wrǣtlic.
  • Sensory judgments are dominated by sight (60%) and the experiential category (22.10%). Smell (8.01%) and hearing (6.63%) are minor, and taste, temperature and touch are each under 2%.
  • Cognitive judgments are mostly religious. Holiness accounts for 46.20%, religiousness 18.62% and value 10.34%. Familiarity rarely surfaces in the vocabulary.
  • Among behavioural judgments, 58.90% concern conformity to God's wishes. Smaller shares go to eloquence (7.53%), power (6.85%) and favourable periods (6.85%).
  • Sensory and cognitive judgments combine about as often as they occur alone (49.84% vs 48.24%, with 1.91% undetermined). There is no clear preference for either pattern.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The study separates evaluations that describe the object's properties from evaluations that report the perceiver's reaction, and assigns these to different lexical groups.
  • I2. Each evaluative occurrence carries a dimension tag (sensory, cognitive or behavioural) plus a finer subtype, such as sight, smell, holiness or eloquence.
  • I3. Appearance words such as fæger spread from physical looks to inner virtue and conduct, so context decides which reading applies.
  • I4. The annotation scheme keeps an explicit "undetermined" label for cases where the evaluation type cannot be decided.
  • I5. Each attestation is annotated twice: once with its whole poem (context) and once with the adjacent words (cotext).

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): Evaluative predicates could be labelled as either stimulus-property or experiencer-response. The parser could then attach the judgment to the right participant, the thing or the feeler.
  • I2 (world): Entity states could store praise or blame along these same axes. A question like "why was X admired?" would then get an explainable answer instead of a bare positive flag.
  • I3 (world): The ontology could record that a single adjective has sensory, moral and behavioural senses. The tree's head noun (person, deed, object) could then select the sense.
  • I4 (learn): Silver-data pipelines could allow an abstain label when witness parsers disagree on a semantic class. This would keep training labels from being forced.
  • I5 (learn): Evaluations of sense or role choices could report document-level and local-window accuracy separately. This would show whether errors come from missing discourse context or from local syntax.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of Castilla-La ManchaCiudad Real · Spain5 works · 38 citations

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksClassics · 67 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 159 works

Cite

Cite as Francisco Javier Minaya Gómez. 2020. Mixing pleasure and beauty: positive aesthetic experience in Old English poetry. Journal of English Studies 18.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18172/jes.4417

@article{gomez2020mixing,
  title = {{Mixing pleasure and beauty: positive aesthetic experience in Old English poetry}},
  author = {Francisco Javier Minaya Gómez},
  journal = {Journal of English Studies 18},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.18172/jes.4417},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.4417}
}

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