This volume represents some of the most exciting current thinking on the theory of meter. It includes papers from leading experts in the field, including Nigel Fabb, Kristin Hanson, Paul Kiparsky, Marina Tarlinskaja, Barry Scherr, among others. The book focuses on a wide variety of languages, including English, Finnish, Estonian, Russian, Japanese, Somali, Old Norse, Latin, and Greek. It contains diverse theoretical approaches that are brought together for the first time, including Optimality Theory, the Russian school of metrics, a mora-based approach, and a semantic-pragmatic approach. The book will be of interest to both linguists and students of poetry. Intro -- Acknowledgements -- Table of contents -- Introduction -- 1. Music and meter -- A modular metrics for folk verse -- 2. Metricality -- What is "metricality"? English iambic pentameter -- 3. English meter -- Generated metrical form and implied metrical form -- Anapests and anti-resolution -- Shakespeare's lyric and dramatic metrical styles -- Longfellow's long line -- 4. Old Norse -- The rise of the quatrain in Germanic: musicality and word based rhythm in eddic meters -- 5. Mora counting meters -- The function of pauses in metrical studies: acoustic evidence from Japanese verse -- Iambic meter in Somali -- 6. Modelling statistical preferences -- Constraints, complexity, and the grammar of poetry -- Modelling the linguistics-poetics interface -- 7. Russian meter -- Generative metrics and the comparative approach: Russian iambic tetrameter in a comparative perspective -- Structural dynamics in the Onegin stanza -- 8. Classical and Roman metrics -- The ancient iambic trimeter: a disbalanced harmony -- Author index -- Subject and language index -- List of contributors.
|