ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the affective qualities of verbal utterances beyond their function as a linguistic representational system. Poetic speech and song can add another level of affective communication beyond the meaning of the words being uttered. The meter of poetic speech and song forms a grammar of auditory movement in how the utterances are arranged to be delivered. Plato and Pinker may have both been right about the effect of poetry and music but totally wrong about its importance in human culture and cognitive processes. The mask may have enhanced and personalized speech perception by "telescoping" language processing by means of highly coordinated movement, gestures, and heightened poetic language. The chapter also examines the cognitive and affective power of this kind of unintelligible speech. Greek drama is replete with the vocalization of virtually unintelligible sounds that are uttered at the heights of emotion.
