Abstract
How did blind Milton create so lexically rich and syntactically complex a poem as Paradise Lost? Lexical and phrasal repetitions, routinely collected by full-text retrieval programs, contribute data that can be interpreted within the model of language production theorized by present-day cognitive psychology and neuroscience. A single memory network, focused on Milton’s famous line in Book I, "the Arch-fiend lay / Chain’d on the burning lake," illustrates how Milton’s extended working memory overcame the constraining chunkiness of flow-state composition.
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Lancashire, I. (2014). Paradise Lost and Milton’s Associative Memory. In: Dershowitz, N., Nissan, E. (eds) Language, Culture, Computation. Computing of the Humanities, Law, and Narratives. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8002. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45324-3_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45324-3_6
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