<snip>
"Prosody" in linguistics means something utterly different from "prosody" in
metrics. [RH]
yes, and yet some linguists are doing metrics. [AF]
<snip>
I'm not sure about 'and yet'. Since metrical prosody works by restricting
speech prosody in particular ways, surely attempting to find a principled
explanation for how this process works is a legitimate goal for linguistics
and not really unexpected. Generative metrics, for example, tries to show
how individual stresses occur or fail to occur at every level of analysis
(syllables, words and phrases). In principle, this brings together lexical
stress (individual words) and suprasegmental stress and pits them against
'metrical' stress. Against a predetermined metrical template (the metre,
made up of feet, in other analyses) you mark out phrases plus the pattern of
stressed and unstressed units at each level of analysis to build up a tree
structure. So ideologically it's a theory based on hierarchy. Mismatches
between the groupings at the first (phrasal) level and the groupings at the
template level (the feet, in effect) or between the actual stress pattern
and the template pattern are two indicators of complexity and of potential
interest within the poem. Found together they are a sign of unmetricality.
Or this, at least, is the theory as I understand it.
Unfortunately I can never get away from the feeling (I have it with Attridge
also, for slightly different reasons) that analyses of this sort trail along
in the wake of metrical practice rather than explaining how it comes about.
There is also, potentially, a degree of whimsy in how you break up the
phrases. I have similar problems with the generative theory of tonal music.
<snip>
I'd see Attridge as a metricist who's drawing on linguistics (in +The
Rhythms of English Poetry+). REP is fascinating, but I'm not sure it's
acceptable as descriptive system -- over-complicated. [RH]
I agree! [AF]
<snip>
The problem with promotion/demotion and other Attridge rules isn't that the
theory is complicated per se but that it seems to be accounting for what
happens simply by adding specifications in a rather banal way. In this sense
generative metrics strikes me as more ambitious (if scarcely more
convincing). With Lerdahl & Jackendoff on music one again gets the feeling
that rules (in this case the well formedness rules) are being developed to
fit the case rather than to _explain_ the case. However, there is at least
one academic who takes L&J back to poetry to develop yet another theory of
prosody. Once more I'm not convinced.
CW
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Permission granted. But not to do whatever you want. (Cage)
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