ABSTRACT
Picasso’s poetry is fascinating as a form of communication from someone who is primarily known as a painter and sculptor. His poetry follows a technique very similar to his cubist collage, adjoining word strings in which semantic relations remain open and multidirectional, so that the reader is free to extract multiple interpretations from the text in what we identify as a form of contingent simultaneity. Furthermore, the graphic elements that appear in his poems do not only serve an important syntactic role but also remind us of the physical presence of words. We analyze Picasso’s combinatorial approach to language from the perspective of “linear grammars” as analyzed by Culicover and Jackendoff (2005) and Culicover (2016). We assume that the complex linguistic configurations in his poetry display many symptoms of lower levels of linguistic hierarchy. More concretely, we propose an autonomous semantic approach to his adjunctive structures that goes along those introduced by the simpler syntax hypothesis presented by these authors.
