Rhyme

This chapter is dedicated to rhyme as an element of poetic form and to the role it plays in the act of reading. The chapter opens with the re-interpretation of a standard definition of rhyme in cognitive terms before offering an account of how rhyme is processed and evaluated during reading, focusing particularly on the temporal dimension of the text-comprehension process. It then addresses four commonly assumed functions of rhyme: the euphonic, the mnemonic, the structural and the semantic function. The chapter concludes with some guidelines regarding possible applications of the presented view of rhyme to scholarly analyses of poetry.