Home › Glossary › Letter L

Labile voice

Concept
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A poetic voice that shifts identity, gender, or perspective fluidly within a single poem.

Detailed Definition
Labile voice is a grammatical construction where a verb alternates between transitive and intransitive uses without morphological change (e.g., “The door opened” vs. “He opened the door”), and in poetry, such verbs create ambiguity of agency—suggesting events that happen spontaneously or fatefully; this syntactic flexibility allows poets to blur boundaries between action and occurrence, as in “The heart broke,” where suffering feels both personal and inevitable.
Example
Example in poetry:
Labile voice shifts agency: “The door opened” (vs. “He opened the door”); In poetry: “Mist swallowed the path”; Passive without agent; creates mystery or inevitability; common in nature poetry; avoids specifying actor.
Additional Notes
Voice shifting between stable positions, identity in flux. Postmodern technique questioning unified speaker. Related to fragmented persona; study with experimental and confessional modes.
Also Known As
shifting persona fluid speaker
Skip to main content