Imagistic and propositional languages in classical Chinese poetry

Abstract

We analyze the use of “imagistic lan-guage” and “propositional language” in Classical Chinese poems. It is commonly held that the lines in the middle of a poem tend to be imagistic, while those at the end tend to be propositional. Using features proposed by two literary scholars, Yu-kung Kao and Tsu-lin Mei, we report on the distribution of the imagistic and propositional styles in a tree-bank of Classical Chinese poems. We conclude that imagistic language is indeed rarely found at the end of poems, but propositional language may be more present in the middle of the poem than previously assumed.