David Chisholm

Generative prosody and English verse

Abstract The primary task of generative prosody is to discover the principles which underlie the poets selection and rejection of linguistic material for use in an essentially non-linguistic system (meter) and to formalize these principles as rules of prosody capable of generating metrical lines of verse without predicting unmetrical lines. This essay is an attempt to explore certain aspects of these rules in the lyric iambic pentameters of Shakespeare and Pope, with some comparative references to the German verse tradition. Introductory remarks on generative prosody and the concept of metricality (section 1.) are followed by an evaluation of a recently proposed theory of English meter (section 2.) and a discussion of levels of abstraction in prosodic and linguistic feature analysis (section 3.). The final section includes remarks on stress and lexicality as prosodic features (section 3.2.), the concept of metrical ambiguity (section 3.3.) and suggested modifications of the Magnuson-Ryder theory of prosody (sections 3.4.–3.6.). The essay concludes with a discussion of positional rules (section 3.7.) and a prosody for English iambic pentameter verse (section 3.8.).

Phonological patterning in German verse

SummaryWhile numerous tentative conclusions might be drawn from the data presented here, the following generalizations are consistently supported by the results of the Phonological Frames Program:(1) In the iambic pentameter poems analyzed, the poetic style of the late nineteenth-century poet Conrad Ferdinand Meyer is distinguished from the early nineteenth-century poets Goethe, Schlegel, Brentano, and Mörike by a very high coefficient of phonological equivalence in both primary and secondary even frames, as well as a tendency to increase odd-frame equivalence in the second half of the poem.(2) The phonological style of the sonnets by Heinrich Heine contrasts sharply with that of his early nineteenth-century contemporaries and shows a strong similarity to that of C. F. Meyer. Like Meyer, Heine has a higher coefficient of equivalence in primary and secondary even frames, and shows a tendency to increase disruptive equivalences in the second half of the poem.(3) Goethe is distinguished from the other poets by having the least contrast between even and odd frame equivalences, the lowest range of values from one poem to another, the lowest coefficient of equivalence in Primary Frames 1 through 4, and the highest percentage of decrease in Frame 1 equivalences in the second half of the verse line.(4) All poets analyzed show a higher coefficient of phonological equivalence in primary frames than in secondary even frames, even when end-rhyme is excluded from consideration.Conclusions based on the results presented here are of course subject to modification as the investigation is extended to include other verse forms, poets, and periods. The results obtained thus far, however, demonstrate that individual stylistic features which distinguish the work of one poet from another are present on the phonological level as well as the conceptual level of the verse structure. Poetic phonology represents a fertile field for further investigations of style.

Encoding Verse Texts

This article identifies problems and proposes solutions for encoding verse texts in SGML. It is organized around a series of distinctions and oppositions which the TEI Work Group on Verse regard as significant. These include examination of the formal properties which distinguish verse from prose, followed by discussions of (1) text-searching vs analysis, (2) markup vs algorithms, (3) markup vs transcription, (4) uniformity vs choice, (5) specificity vs generality, (6) metrical convention vs linguistic realization, (7) structural vs non-structural divisions and (8) fidelity vs interpretation. Using German and English verse forms as illustrations, the advantages and disadvantages of pre-line tagging, in-line tagging and feature structure analysis are discussed. We suggest that metrical and rhyme conventions always be tagged at the highest possible level of text divisions.

Prosodic Aspects of German Hexameter Verse

Within the context of prosodic feature analysis, this essay discusses some German manifestations of hexameter verse from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Samples of hexameters by seven German poets-Johann Heinrich Voss, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, Eduard Morike, Friedrich Hebbel, Thomas Mann, and Bertolt Brecht-are compared on both the metrical and the prosodic level of analysis. The metrical pattern for the German hexameter line allows for sixteen distinct line-types based solely on the distribution of syllables in nonprominent positions of the meter, and the data show that most poets favored certain line-types and tended to avoid others. Voss, Goethe, Schiller, and Hebbel, for example, favored line-types that begin with the configuration xoxoox (where x and o represent syllables in prominent and nonprominent positions, respectively), while Brecht preferred lines that are dactylic throughout, and Mann displayed no clear preference for any particular line-type. The data for the metrical configurations also reveal a strong similarity between the hexameters favored by Goethe and Hebbel, despite the fact that Hebbels were written about sixty years after Goethes. On the prosodic level, there are striking differences between the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets and the twentieth-century poets (i.e., Mann and Brecht). For example, compound words containing contiguous stressed syllables, which occur only rarely in hexameter verse by Goethe, Schiller, and Hebbel, were consistently used in the same metrical relation by other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poets; Mann was inconsistent in his use of this word-type; and Brecht almost always placed it precisely in a metrical relation which the earlier poets invari- ably avoided. Among other things, Brechts prosodic style is marked by the This essay is based in part on a paper presented at the Berkeley-Michigan Germanic