Annie:
<snip>
I find [Attridge] lacking re accentual-syllabic poetry, because with no idea
of the foot, there is no way to account for the beauty & surprise created by
counterpoint between the expected metrical pattern and the actual metrical
pattern of a line, for the physical effect when you expect an iamb and get a
spondee. All his system can do is describe what is there syllable by
syllable. [AF]
<snip>
Yes. Attridge and the generativists look at the relationship between metre
and tactus rather differently. Attridge makes implied claims about how
speech prosody folds into metrical prosody at the lowest common denominator
whereas the generativists make implied claims further up the chain.
Attridge's beat/offbeat is very close to metronomic time. He emphasises the
tactus as a unit. Thus the offbeat rule and the promotion rule are
constraints on temporal flexibility. If one or two unstressed syllables may
realise an offbeat this implies that the relative length of two unstressed
syllable is insignificant between 1 <> 1 and 1 <> 0.5, but if the middle one
of three unstressed syllables can realise a beat then this implies a
downward limit (one third) on any further reduction in the relative length
of the shortest syllable. (The assumption behind all this, of course, is
that the basic pattern of English stress is alternation.)
What you've identified is, I think, exactly the sort of
mouse-in-the-cornfield problem that comes about from that very basic level
of analysis.
Although the tactus is largely out of sight in the generative model, by
contrast, it is nonetheless a ground upon which the metrical template is
laid out and above which the various layers of metrical groupings are built
up. (It reappears in Lerdahl & Jackendoff on metre in tonal music.)
However, the elephant in the room with the generative approach is how
metrical templates actually come about other than through (for example)
creative whim.
CW
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