Metrical Feet Research Articles

The Reasons for Neglecting some Taf'ilas (metrical feet) and Composing in other Metres

It is rhythm that makes poetry different from prose. The poetic texts that had reached us from ancient times were composed following rhythms and rules which were different from those regulating the composition of poetry. This was in ancient times; but as for what distinguishes poetry today, it is external music, represented by metre and rhyme-scheme including equal syllables that are able to create a sort of effective rhythm that touches the human self. As for other non-human creatures (animals, for example), it is a wellknown fact that they are moved by music as what happens in the circus. A professor in an Iraqi university says thet he has heard a camel-herd singing to his camels "Huduho, huduhudo, huduho, huduhudo" and they moved their legs according to the pace of this rhythm. Though these words, in fact, were meaningless, they match the Taweel (long) metre consisting It is rhythm that makes poetry different from prose. The poetic texts that had reached us from ancient times were composed following rhythms and rules which were different from those regulating the composition of poetry. This was in ancient times; but as for what distinguishes poetry today, it is external music, represented by metre and rhyme-scheme including equal syllables that are able to create a sort of effective rhythm that touches the human self. As for other non-human creatures (animals, for example), it is a wellknown fact that they are moved by music as what happens in the circus. A professor in an Iraqi university says thet he has heard a camel-herd singing to his camels "Huduho, huduhudo, huduho, huduhudo" and they moved their legs according to the pace of this rhythm. Though these words, in fact, were meaningless, they match the Taweel (long) metre consisting of: fa'ulun-mafa'ilun-fa'ulun-mafa'ilun.As for the human self, the love of music does not need any proof.

Milton in China

Milton in China

Metrical Structure and Licensing: An Argument from Ukrainian

It has been debated in phonological literature whether word stress should be modeled using metrical grids or feet and how its directionality is assigned. In this article, we discuss new data from Ukrainian, which has a hybrid metrical system with unpredictable lexical stress and grammatical iterative secondary stress. We demonstrate that Ukrainian poses a challenge for current metrical theories relying on gradient alignment and propose an analysis based on categorical alignment coupled with a rhythmic licensing constraint mandating that lapses are located near the main stress (LAPSE-AT-PEAK). We argue that LAPSE-AT-PEAK is required regardless of the stress representations (feet or grids) assumed.

Aportaciones a la evolución castellana de f- latina en su contexto románico: del signo lingüístico al signo poético

AbstractThe main objective of the current paper is the study of the aspiration process and its loss of Latin f- in Spanish during the Middle Ages in contrast with other peninsular languages from the metric of the texts written in verse (from the Auto de los Reyes Magos until the Cancionero of Juan del Enzina). The analysis of the sounds distributed along the metrical feet of the verses sheds light on the reconstruction of the phonological element which underlies in the spelling. The systematic application of the dyalepha and synalepha, according to each period, will allow us to obtain an accurate perspective of this phenomenon, as well as to place it in its appropriate variational level of usage.

Diphthongs are micro-feet: Prominence and sonority in the nucleus

In this paper we look at prominence in diphthongs and argue that diphthongs are structured in the same way metrical feet are. We propose a set of OT constraints that generates a typology of micro-feet. These are either iambic or trochaic or they are quality/sonority-sensitive with default to iamb or trochee in case of sonority plateaus (i.e., ui and iu). Crucially, we did not find any language with quantity-sensitive micro-feet. This gap is explained by the assumption that diphthongs are maximally bimoraic and that length in diphthongs is phonologically represented as mora sharing. For a quantity-sensitivity constraint targeting pairs of moras the two vowels in a diphthong are thus indistinguishable and prominence determination is left to sonority or foot form constraints which locate the prominence at an edge of the foot.

A Unified Model of Mono- and Bilingual Intelligibility

The construct of intelligibility in L2 speech has primarily been operationalized functionally in terms of speech being classified as intelligible if the listeners successfully recovered the intended message (Munro & Derwing, 1995). In this paper, I will operationalize intelligibility psycholinguistically in terms of spoken word recognition. We do not need to invoke any special machinery for intelligibility in bilinguals; monolinguals and bilinguals process speech in the same way (Libben, 2000; Libben & Goral, 2015). Listeners have to segment the speech stream and the parser maps the phonetic elements onto higher-level linguistic representations such as phonemes, syllable nodes and metrical feet. The role of experience in the listener is modelled analogously to high-variability phonetic training (HVPT) via broadening the prior likelihood (in a Bayesian sense) of the mapping of an L2 phone onto an extant phonological category. I conclude by discussing pedagogic implications, and suggesting that pedagogic models that advocate a single non-native variety of English, which will be intelligible to all ears (i.e. parsable by all grammars), are problematic psycholinguistically.

Optimality Theory, Language Typology, and Universalist Metrics

In Russom (2011), I defended a universalist hypothesis that the constituents of poetic form are abstracted from natural linguistic constituents: metrical positions from phonological constituents, usually syllables; metrical feet from morphological constituents, usually words; and metrical lines from syntactic constituents, usually sentences. An important corollary to this hypothesis is that norms for realization of a metrical constituent are based on norms for the corresponding linguistic constituent. Optimality Theory provides a universalist account of relevant linguistic norms and deals effectively with situations in which norms conflict, employing ranked violable rules. Language Typology provides a universalist account of relevant syntactic norms. In this paper I integrate these independently grounded methodologies and use them to explain the distribution of constituents within the line, identifying a variety of important facts that seem to have escaped previous notice. Universalist claims are tested against meters from each of the major language types: subject-verb-object (SVO), subject-object-verb (SOV) and verb-subject-object (VSO). My findings are incompatible with the claim that “lines are sequences of syllables, rather than of words or phrases” (Fabb, Halle 2008: 11).

Good grief: notes on (re)animating Thomas Hoccleve in comics

This adaptation and analysis of ‘My Compleinte’ focuses less on Thomas Hoccleve’s metrical feet than on his physical ones. It reimagines – and redraws – Hoccleve as a comic book protagonist by condensing and adapting the fifteenth-century poem into a 14-page comic. The accompanying essay uses contemporary comics theory to think about the sensory aesthetics of Hoccleve’s anxiety, reads his feet and heart as key figures in the poem, and suggests parallels between scribal labor and comics drafting. The project was initially conceived as a creative experiment, an homage to the poem, and a teaching aid.

Haiti Glass by Lenelle Moïse

Reviewed by: Haiti Glass by Lenelle Moïse Patrick Sylvain Haiti Glass. By Lenelle Moïse. City Lights Books, 2014. ISBN 978-0-87286-614-0. 79 pp. $10.95 US. Paperback. Haiti Glass inspires a willingness to walk on shards. It beckons one's ears to hear the crunching sounds of what remains underfoot, wrecked, neglected, and one must keep the eyes open so as not to misstep—or miss the meaning of lines. Lines are tricky, and Lenelle Moïse's cadence is not regular: it is not molded in the classical tradition of terse verse, or in the predictability of forms. Haiti Glass is a performative hybrid of poetry, prose, theater, and spoken word. It is a house of memories that contains rooms of expression, inhabited by multiple voices: colorful, edgy, watchful, risky, risqué, and intellectually honest. The first stanza of the poem "gift a sea" illustrates this complexity as the voice in the poem (the poet's voice, one can assume) wrestles with the verbal violence of her grandfather. after i becamegrandfather called me drynasty namesstood small in my kitchenbaking kisses at midnightpraying rocksagainst the womenin my love Despite the "dry / nasty names" that the grandfather hurled at the subject of the poem, the "i" who "became" and who is also rendered "small" in the first stanza is the same as the speaker of the poem. This narrator goes on to rescue the grandfather in the second stanza, offering him to the world as a humane soul who unknowingly gave agency to his granddaughter. Moïse writes: but beforewhen i was tiny thirstyhe bought me a vintage typewriterheavy and teal it splashed under my palms [End Page 170] a thrifted gift a sea in my bloodthe first toolmy damp fingers usedto cool and name my self. Here, the smallness of the speaker disappears and she becomes fortified through the act of self-naming (via a "thrifted" medium that "gift[ed] a sea" of possibilities). Through the precise use of language, Moïse marshals her adjectives, nouns, and verbs to build magnetic, piquant poems. Moreover, as a playwright and a performer, Moïse knows how to hook her audience. The enjambments of her poetic lines carry deep syntactical intentionality as she draws in the reader or listener. "Praying rocks," for example, is an odd yet effective phrase that carries an affective result when it is linked to or against the lover. In a sense, the grandfather's inability to hurl rocks at the lover has resulted in his "praying rocks" so that the lover might still be harmed. Haiti Glass is a careful promenade within Moïse's intimate house, where not a single room is dull and where the poet, very early on, refuses to be a kept doll by maintaining a keen awareness of her environment. Moïse begins her book with the title poem, "haiti glass," which presents a very unusual construction of the syllables that constitute the metrical feet per line. This poem takes the form of couplets that, while appearing uneven, contain a hidden metrical scheme of eight syllables each. Poems written in English often follow the pentameter, which consists of ten syllables per line—five stressed and five unstressed. Here, however, the falling meter, with reversed syllabic line schemes of 3/5 or 5/3 or equal syllabic schemes of 4/4, forms an unusual rhythm or pattern. The last couplet is different, with a total of nine syllables in a 6/3 pattern, which could have been the result of an editor requesting the article "the" to be inserted in the last couplet. Through "haiti glass," Moïse demonstrates her essential control of language in content, syntax, and rhythm. Thus, reading the first two couplets, one is immediately aware of the author's mastery and playfulness in constructing the poem in the way she did: haiti glasshaiti glassstar in my mouth beautiful burningspiky light wish so hardscrapes my soft palates [End Page 171] tongue a shadowof swollen loss language of shardsflicker stutter pronouncing the distancerays bruise gums How could such...

Stylistics and the cultural context in literary translation

Considering the example of the translation of Njegoš’s The Mountain Wreath into the German language, the paper analyses the translational solutions that are dictated by the principles of the subject. The translator Alois Schmaus chose to take this step in order to bring home to the modern reader a world which appears to be archaic. He made this decision for two reasons. First, the German reader is unfamiliar with the historical context that is the subject of this poem; secondly the rules of prosody in Serbian and German do not match. By choosing to carry over the Serbian epic decasyllable, Schmaus favours the Serbian poetic tradition. From the historical point of view German verse, constructed as an Alexandrine, is burdened with the context of courtly poetics. The hexameter, meanwhile, which was introduced into German literature by Klopstock and later popularised by Voss and Goethe, appears in the context of the rise of the bourgeoisie. Both verses require changes while being translated, which affect the poem’s characteristics. In order to maintain authenticity, Schmaus pleads for the “Serbian trochee”: iamb and dactyl, metrical feet that are closer to the German language, would have impeded the setting the diaeresis and affected the syntax. Because of this, Schmaus places a spondee at the end of every verse and sets the historical context in the tradition of martyrdom.

ZeuScansion: A tool for scansion of English poetry

We present a finite state technology based system capable of performing metrical scansion of verse written in English. Scansion is the traditional task of analyzing the lines of a poem, marking the stressed and non-stressed elements, and dividing the line into metrical feet. The system's workflow is composed of several subtasks designed around finite state machines that analyze verse by performing tokenization, part of speech tagging, stress placement, and unknown word stress pattern guessing. The scanner also classifies its input according to the predominant type of metrical foot found. We also present a brief evaluation of the system using a gold standard corpus of human-scanned verse, on which a per-syllable accuracy of 86.78% is reached. The program uses open-source components and is released under the GNU GPL license.

Editorial: Phonological and Phonetic Competence: Between Grammar, Signal Processing, and Neural Activity.

The present collection addresses the place and role of phonology (as an object of study, not as a scientific field) within a wider range of neighboring domains. Generally, the relevance of phonological structure in language may be claimed to derive from the fact that phonology constitutes a domain of its own within language (along with syntax, semantics, morphology), but also interfaces intimately with other domains such as cognition, articulation, and perception in general. From this dual nature, it follows that phonology may be an object of linguistic description and theory (for an overview see Goldsmith, 1995; de Lacy, 2012) as well as an object of cognitive and behavioral studies (for an overview see Cohn et al., 2012). Ideally, however, theoretical and empirical studies keep this dual nature of phonology in mind and pay attention to both sides of the coin. Articles in the present Research Topic attempt to capture different aspects of this overall discussion. The starting point for this Research Topic was a Priority Programme on experimental research in phonology and phonetics funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG; SPP 1234). Based on this programme, the aim of this Research Topic is to draw together empirical work in the field of segmental and prosodic processing and representation and phonological theory. Contributions address the interface of the speech sound systems investigated in phonology, the representations of articulated speech, perception, acquisition and processing established in phonetics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics. Main topics of investigation include: (1) sounds and sound-changing processes—systemic and functional aspects, (2) prosodic units such as syllables and metrical feet—systemic properties, processing, and phonetic consequences, and (3) tones as building blocks of the sentence melody—their relation to the level of linguistic expressions on the one hand, their phonetic realization (e.g., tonal height and contours) and perception on the other hand. In addition, topics (1) and (2) extend to the question how phonological representations are stored in the mental lexicon: specified minimally in terms of categorical phonological information or as variable phonetic imprint of the exemplars in the input. Diagonally to these thematic domains, the present Research Topic shows a strong focus on up-to-date experimental methods. Contributions go far beyond traditional linguistic analysis, and make use of psycho- and neuro-linguistic methods.

Poetic Cargo: Intertextuality in Meleager’s Message to Phanion ( AP 12.53)

Scholars have read Meleager AP 12.53, in which ships carry news to his beloved Phanion, as a reflection of a real event in the poet’s life, but I interpret this epigram as a self-reflexive celebration of Meleager’s poetic skill. Adapting erotic and maritime motifs from Sappho, Pindar, Nossis, and Posidippus, as well as the propemptikon format, this poem anticipates not its poet’s arrival, but delivery of the poem itself: when Meleager announces that he “voyages on foot” (ποσσ δ πεζοπόρον), he puns on the idea of metrical feet. The propemptikon motif and metrical pun are later adopted by Roman poets

Metrical Feet on the Road of Poetry: Foot Puns and Literary Polemic in Tibullus

Throughout his two books, Tibullus cultivates feet, chains, and related images as metapoetic symbols to express both his literary program and his involvement in contemporary literary polemic between elegy and epic. Unlike Propertius and Ovid, Tibullus engages only minimally in explicit programmatics and polemics, but metapoetic symbolism reveals literary concerns analogous to those of the other elegists. In Tibullus 1.1, these symbols allow the speaker’s rejection of riches and soldiering to function also as a recusatio from writing panegyric epic for Messalla.

Good, bad and ugly word stress – fMRI evidence for foot structure driven processing of prosodic violations

Using a stress violation paradigm, we investigated whether metrical feet constrain the way prosodic patterns are processed and evaluated.Processing of correctly versus incorrectly stressed words was associated with activation in left posterior angular and retrosplenial cortex, indicating the recognition of an expected and familiar pattern, whereas the inverse contrast yielded enhanced bilateral activation in the superior temporal gyrus, reflecting higher costs in auditory (re-)analysis. More fine-grained analyses of severe versus mild stress violations revealed activations of the left superior temporal and left anterior angular gyrus whereas the opposite contrast led to frontal activations including Broca’s area and its right-hemisphere homologue, suggesting that detection of mild violations lead to increased effort in working memory and deeper phonological processing.Our results provide first evidence that different incorrect stress patterns are processed in a qualitatively different way and that the underlying foot structure seems to determine potential stress positions in German words.

<em>Reading Victorian Poetry</em>, by Richard Cronin

Reviewed by: Reading Victorian Poetry by Richard Cronin Isobel Armstrong (bio) Reading Victorian Poetry, by Richard Cronin; pp. 238. Chichester and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, £60.00, $99.95. Richard Cronin’s exceptionally fine book carries out just what its title promises—reading. The pleasure of his adroit, meticulously imaginative insights into verbal and metrical effects is constant. He is an adept reader of form and meaning, whether this is Walt Whitman’s “heady paratactic expansiveness” (90), or Alfred Tennyson’s incisive alliteration of “falter” and “firmly” in In Memoriam (1850), where “the thirteenth line is firm if read iambically, but falters if trochees are allowed to intrude” (164). He notes that Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867) carries only one half rhyme, “breath,” rhyming, with significant hesitancy, with “faith” (qtd. in Cronin 158). If the subject of A. C. Swinburne’s “Anactoria” (1866) is enjoined to crush Sappho’s love with “cruel faultless feet,” his lines “deploy metrical feet that stamp themselves on the reader’s ear just as pitilessly” (126). And in Robert Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi” (1855) “the feet, metrical and corporeal, break into a little dance, a soft shoe shuffle” (149). Cronin’s eye and ear for verbal detail is matched by his capacity to invoke just the right historical detail. The image of the door in Christina Rossetti’s “Winter: My Secret” (1862) gains from his reminder that Rossetti sat for the head of Christ in William Holman Hunt’s “The Light of the World” in 1853, where Hunt used a quotation from Revelation 3:20, “Behold, I stand at the door.” He has taken the trouble to check Browning’s reference to George Whitefield’s Hymns for Social Worship (1753) in “Christmas-Eve” (1850), disclosing the relevance of Whitefield’s title to collective worship. This incisiveness extends to Cronin’s capacity for telling epigram: of Tennyson’s Maud (1855) he writes, “I doubt that any poem in English keeps its finger so attentively on its own pulse” (76); of religious feeling he asserts, “It is the atheist poetry of the century that cultivates evangelical fervour more impressively than the Christian” (193). Both at the beginning and the end of his book he claims that to explore the variety of Victorian poetry is his main project. But I think he is doing something much more searching and original than this unobjectionable but bland assertion suggests. To be sure, his method and organization is calculated to bring out the plenitude and heterogeneous experiment in Victorian poetry. Cronin imaginatively juxtaposes a range of poets, male and female, in each chapter—Tennyson, Augusta Webster, Browning, the Spasmodics, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Amy Levy, for instance—not allowing any one to take precedence. (Though Dante Gabriel Rossetti, deservedly through Cronin’s subtle readings, takes an unusually prominent place.) The mix of poets is paralleled by an eclectic mix of texts. Chapter 6 is an example, where cohabit Rossetti’s “The Woodspurge” (1870), Tennyson’s “Mariana” (1830) and Idylls of the King (1859–85), Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi” and “Caliban upon Setebos” (1864) (this last given a particularly sophisticated and thoughtful reading), and Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” Cronin’s hidden project begins in his first chapter, where, through brilliant and enjoyable close readings of Tennyson’s “The Palace of Art” (1833, revised 1842), Rossetti’s “The Burden of Ninevah” (1856), and John Davidson’s “The Crystal Palace” (1908), he brings together three poems concerned with a new culture of display exemplified by the museum and popular spectacle at the Sydenham Crystal Palace. He examines the Victorian poet’s unease with the democratization of culture, with poetry’s isolation from daily life, and with its compromised status as a secondary form freighted [End Page 556] with the weight of history. A troubled aesthetic of fracture emerged, but one that responded to the new modern situation with vitality and inventiveness. I take from Cronin’s argument that it was the aesthetics of fracture, so concerned with belatedness, that paradoxically gave Victorian poetry its originality, its unique energy and creativity. The central chapters explore the many ways the formal expression of that fracture emerge—the double poem...

Stress “deafness” in a Language with Fixed Word Stress: An ERP Study on Polish

The aim of the present contribution was to examine the factors influencing the prosodic processing in a language with predictable word stress. For Polish, a language with fixed penultimate stress but several well-defined exceptions, difficulties in the processing and representation of prosodic information have been reported (e.g., Peperkamp and Dupoux, 2002). The present study utilized event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the factors influencing prosodic processing in Polish. These factors are (i) the predictability of stress and (ii) the prosodic structure in terms of metrical feet. Polish native speakers were presented with correctly and incorrectly stressed Polish words and instructed to judge the correctness of the perceived stress patterns. For some stress violations, an early negativity was found which was interpreted as a reflection of an error-detection mechanism. In addition, exceptional stress patterns (=antepenultimate stress) and post-lexical (=initial) stress evoked a task-related positivity effect (P300) whose amplitude and latency is correlated with the degree of anomaly and deviation from an expectation. In contrast, violations involving the default (=penultimate stress) did not produce such an effect. This asymmetrical result is interpreted to reflect that Polish native speakers are less sensitive to the default pattern than to the exceptional or post-lexical patterns. Behavioral results are orthogonal to the electrophysiological results showing that Polish speakers had difficulties to reject any kind of stress violation. Thus, on a meta-linguistic level Polish speakers appeared to be stress-“deaf” for any kind of stress manipulation, whereas the neural reactions differentiate between the default and lexicalized patterns.

Is Metrical Foot a Phonetic Object?

The assumption behind this pilot study is that metrical feet are not ‘groups of syllables’ or ‘interstress intervals’ but rather ‘groups of vowels’ extracted from the phonetic material contained between two stresses. We analysed the duration, pitch, intensity and acoustic energy of all vowels in isolated pronunciations of 72 initially stressed items (mono-, di- and trisyllables). The results reveal that pre-fortis clipping of the stressed vowel and final lengthening are interrelated, which suggests that stressed and unstressed final vowels are able to ‘negotiate’ their durations. Such ‘communication’ between the stressed vowels and the final unstressed ones is possible only if a mediating constituent (the foot) is postulated. Most importantly, we found no significant differences (p < .05) between the total acoustic energy and the total vowel duration in words having a different number of syllables, which supports the assumption of foot-level isochrony in English. It was also observed that the significant increase in vowel duration in stressed CVC monosyllables co-occurs with a significantly greater pitch slope, which we interpret to be a tonally driven implementation of minimal foot binarity requirement.

Phonetic Duration, Phonological Quantity and Prosodic Structure in Inari Saami

Inari Saami, an endangered Finno-Ugric language of Northern Finland, is reported to have a three-way surface contrast in consonant length (short, halflong and long). We studied disyllabic words (C)V1CxV2(C) using data from 5 native speakers under two conditions, with short and long preceding vowel, V1, and found support for the claim that Inari Saami has a ternary contrast in consonant length. The three-way length contrast is more robust following a short V1. The duration of V2 correlates negatively with the length of the medial consonant. However, there is one major departure from this pattern. When both V1 and the medial consonant are long, V2 is also longer. This finding supports the idea that disyllables of this class differ from the others in their prosodic structure in having two metrical feet rather than one. This interpretation tallies with independent evidence from synchronic morphophonology and the historical development of the prosodic system of Inari Saami.

Effects of metrical structure on syllable timing II.

Fourakis and Monahan [J. Linguist. (1988)] examined the effects of two different types of metrical foot (iamb and anapest) on syllable timing in 3 ft utterances. These utterances were comprised of three iambs, three anapests, and every possible combination of the two types. The present research follows the same paradigm but uses trochees and dactyls instead of iambs and anapests. A set of eight 3 ft long sentences was constructed. At one end there was the three trochee sentence: Auctions rescue business. At the other end was the three dactyl sentence: Auctions may rescue his businesses. The intermediate six sentences were formed by different combinations of the metrical feet. Five male and five female native speakers of Midwestern American English were recorded producing five repetitions of each sentence at a normal rate of speech. Segments were assigned syllable membership based on the maximum onset principle. Results will be presented on syllable durations as a function of foot type and sentence type. [Research supported by the University of Wisconsin Madison Graduate School.]