Formal Approaches to Poetry

Recent Developments in Metrics

B. Elan Dresher, Nila Friedberg, B. Elan Dresher, Nila Friedberg

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9783110185225
• eBook ISBN: 9783110197624
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: German Language
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book will create greater public awareness of some recent exciting findings in the formal study of poetry. The last influential volume on the subject, Rhythm and Meter , edited by Paul Kiparsky and Gilbert Youmans, appeared fifteen years ago. Since that time, a number of important theoretical developments have taken place, which have led to new approaches to the analysis of meter. This volume represents some of the most exciting current thinking on the theory of meter. In terms of empirical coverage, the papers focus on a wide variety of languages, including English, Finnish, Estonian, Russian, Japanese, Somali, Old Norse, Latin, and Greek. Thus, the collection is truly international in its scope. The volume also contains diverse theoretical approaches that are brought together for the first time, including Optimality Theory (Kiparsky, Hammond), other constraint-based approaches (Friedberg, Hall, Scherr), the Quantitative approach to verse (Tarlinskaja, Friedberg, Hall, Scherr, Youmans) associated with the Russian school of metrics, a mora-based approach (Cole and Miyashita, Fitzgerald), a semantic-pragmatic approach (Fabb), and an alternative generative approach developed in Estonia (M. Lotman and M. K. Lotman).

The book will be of interest to both linguists interested in stress and speech rhythm, constraint systems, phrasing, and phonology-syntax interaction and poetry, as well as to students of poetry interested in the connection between language and literature.

Table of contents

• Frontmatter
• Table of contents
• Introduction
• A modular metrics for folk verse
• What is “metricality”? English iambic pentameter
• Generated metrical form and implied metrical form
• Anapests and anti-resolution
• Shakespeare’s lyric and dramatic metrical styles
• Longfellow’s long line
• The rise of the quatrain in Germanic: musicality and word based rhythm in eddic meters
• The function of pauses in metrical studies: acoustic evidence from Japanese verse
• Iambic meter in Somali
• Constraints, complexity, and the grammar of poetry
• Modelling the linguistics–poetics interface
• Generative metrics and the comparative approach: Russian iambic tetrameter in a comparative perspective
• Structural dynamics in the Onegin stanza
• The ancient iambic trimeter: a disbalanced harmony
• Backmatter