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self-describing

Concept
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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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 term or expression that comments on or defines itself within context

Detailed Definition
Self-describing poetry explicitly comments on its own composition, materials, or existence within the text, using meta-poetic language to reflect on the act of writing; such verse draws attention to its artificiality while exploring the relationship between language, reality, and creation, as in sonnets about sonnet-writing.
Example
Example in poetry:
John Donne’s “The Canonization” describes love as canonized through poetry itself—self-describing; In “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” Donne compares lovers to a compass, describing the poem’s own unity; Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 claims the beloved lives “so long as men can breathe or eyes can see”—self-describing immortality; Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” describes its own fragmented perspective
Additional Notes
self-describing: A poem or a part of a poem that comments on or explicitly describes its own nature, form, or process of creation; a type of meta-poetry.
Also Known As
Self-defining auto-descriptive self-characterizing Autological
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