Linguistic Change and Metre: A Reply

Abstract

In a recent article, Ad Putter discusses apparent exceptions to the norms governing metrical treatment of weak adjectives in the verse of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and Thomas Hoccleve. Putter advances a purely linguistic explanation for these poets’ variable counting or discounting of inflectional -e in two adjectives whose roots end in /i/ in Middle English, ‘high’ and ‘sly’: The rule applies generally to monosyllabic adjectives, but not to ‘high’ and ‘sly’, where pronunciation of final -e had become optional. The main reason for this, I would suggest, is that final -e was recessive after /i/… . Since Gower and Chaucer were both contemporaries and Londoners, it is reasonable to suppose that the loss of inflectional -e in this specific phonological environment reflected developments in the language of London.1 Yet there exists a long-recognized, well-formed metrical subrule that accounts for nearly all of the counterexamples Putter adduces. This is that the inflectional -e of weak adjectives regularly drops out of metre before a word with aft stress.2 Of the thirty-one examples Putter cites of ‘high’ or ‘sly’ without expected metrical -e in Chaucer, Gower, and Hoccleve, fully twenty-eight are covered by the subsidiary rule because in these cases ‘high’ or ‘sly’ precedes a word with aft stress.3 It is easy to understand the convenience of the aft stress rule for iambic verse, as otherwise poets would be obliged to crowd two unstressed syllables into a single weak position, a disfavoured arrangement, or else to minimize the use of words with aft stress, which are common in Middle English. Many other adjectives than ‘high’ and ‘sly’ exhibit the same alternation between metrical forms with -e and metrical forms without -e. Derek Pearsall cites examples from Chaucer involving ‘fair’, ‘good’, ‘great’, ‘old’, ‘small’, ‘such’, and ‘young’.4 Needless to say, none of these adjectives ends in /i/. The deciding factor for this morphological category, one must conclude, is not phonology at all. Rather, the metrical shape of the following word in the line governs the metrical–phonological form taken by the weak adjective. As Steven R. Guthrie puts it succinctly, ‘the explanation is metrical, not grammatical’.5 Nor is the rule mere tautology, as if one had said, ‘in alternating-stress metres, stresses alternate’, for the rule does not cover the case where the word following the weak adjective is monosyllabic and occupies a metrically weak position in the metre through metrical demotion. The sequence the (metrically unstressed) + [weak adjective without -e] (metrically stressed) + [monosyllabic word] (metrically unstressed), while grammatically and metrically conceivable, was avoided by Chaucer, Gower, and Hoccleve. The aft stress rule is admittedly recherché, a metrical finesse only sporadically recognized in existing scholarship on Chaucerian metres, but it illustrates the broader conclusion that metrical -e in Chaucer, Gower, and Hoccleve cannot be conflated with linguistic -e without qualifications.