Sound Effects of the Poetic Silva in the Morality Plays (autos sacramentales) of Pedro Calderón de la Barca

Abstract

From Plato to Dionysius of Halicarnassus one has postulated a possible relationship between sound and meaning. Although modern linguistics, from Ferdinand de Saussure to Noam Chomsky, ascertains that any possible relationship between them would be arbitrary and conventional, recent philologists like Iván Fónagy and Jorge M. Guitart have proposed, as Plato and Dionysius had done earlier, that some specific sounds strongly suggest particular emotions. In this essay I should like to propose the possible relationship between sound and expression in the autos sacramentales (‘morality plays’) of Pedro Calderón de la Barca as evinced by the use of the poetic form of the silva.