Distant Rhythm: Automatic Enjambment Detection on Four Centuries of Spanish Sonnets

Enjambment takes place when a syntactic unit is broken up across two lines of poetry, giving rise to different stylistic effects. In Spanish literary studies, detailed case-studies of the phenomenon based on single authors exist. However, a larger-scale study spanning hundreds of major and minor authors, across several centuries, is not available so far. Towards that need, we have developed software based on Natural Language Processing (NLP), to automatically identify enjambment (and its type) in Spanish. To evaluate the system, we manually annotated two reference corpora (one diachronic, one from the 20th century). Results are satisfactory for the system's first version, with F1 varying depending on period and enjambment type. As a scholarly corpus to apply the tool, from public HTML sources we created a diachronic corpus covering four centuries of sonnets (3750 poems). We applied the tool to analyze the occurrence of enjambment across stanzaic boundaries in different periods.