The emotional and aesthetic powers of parallelistic diction

•Parallelistic diction consists of linguistically optional features of recurrence.•It is analogous to features of recurrence/symmetry in music and visual aesthetics.•It intensifies emotional impact and aesthetic appeal across multiple contexts.•Given its wide use in many contexts, implications are far-reaching.

Parallelistic features of poetic and rhetorical language use comprise a great variety of linguistically optional patterns of phonological, prosodic, syntactic, and semantic recurrence. Going beyond studies on cognitive facilitation effects of individual parallelistic features (most notably rhyme, alliteration, and meter), the present study shows that the joint employment of multiple such features in 40 sad and joyful poems intensifies all emotional response dimensions (joy, sadness, being moved, intensity, and positive affect) and all aesthetic appreciation dimensions (beauty, liking, and melodiousness) that we measured. Given that parallelistic diction is also used, to different degrees, in ritual language, commercial ads, political slogans, and everyday conversations, the implications of these findings are potentially far-reaching.