some linguistically oriented descriptions of meter published thereafter used this notation, with "1" being the strongest stress. Chomsky and Halle (1968) (in a linguistic, not specifically metrical context) use a similar notation, but in reverse: "1" signifying primary stress, "2" signifying secondary, etc. Steele (1999) and McAuley (1966) both use this as a secondary style of notation. He used the numbers 1 to 4, to indicate varying degrees of stress: strong, half-strong, half-weak, and weak.
In 1900, Otto Jespersen in his "Notes on Metre" was the first to use a four-stress system. Wallace (1996:30) asserts that "We should never use four degrees of speech stress for scanning." His objections include that any four-stress system abolishes the spondee, and that the system from Trager & Smith (1951), for example, is "too much machinery.
Corn describes this system as "a little confusing to the eye" and prefers to use a numerical system such as Jespersen's original four-stress system. Hobsbaum (1996) describes and uses the system. The linguists George Trager and Henry Lee Smith described a four-stress system in their An Outline of English Structure, (1951). Bridges' symbol is actually a shorter version of ⌣. Very short syllables, such as a syllable containing a short 'i'. For example the second syllables of 'brighter' and 'brightest' are both light, despite the consonants in the latter. Light also includes all classically short syllables. That is, if the consonants around a short vowel do not genuinely retard the syllable then it will be counted 'light'. For example: broad, bright, down.Īll syllables with short vowels, even those that would be long 'by position' in Classical terms. Is genuinely long, slows down the reading. In developing a prosody for accentual verse, Robert Bridges classifies the following types of syllable: Symbol Main article: Bridges' Prosody of Accentual Verse This is the notation preferred by the Poetry WikiProject for Wikipedia articles displaying scansion. This is the notation used in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. This notation is used by, for example, Steele (1999), and some less specialist books. By avoiding the macron and breve traditionally associated with the quantity (length) of syllables, ictus and x notation avoids possible confusions it also has the advantage of being easily typed. SymbolĪ weak syllable 'promoted' to secondary stress.īaldwin (1979) regards the use of the ictus (or slash) and x notation as "normal," and argues for its benefits. ) to indicate the middle syllable in a string of three unstressed syllables has been 'promoted' to a secondary or weaker stress.Turco's version of this is to use a dot (
Stress on syllable is between strong and weak ˘ / ˘ / ˘ / ˘ / ˘ /Ĭorn goes on to state that the most common approach adopted for marking fine gradations of stress has been to add the symbol \ for 'intermediate stress'. Corn (1997) describes this as a notation which evolved from the classical notation. ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯īut SOFT! What LIGHT through YONder WINdow BREAKS?įussell (1965/1979), Turco (1968/1986), and Williams (1986) all use the ictus for stressed syllables, and the classical breve for unstressed syllables. Gross & McDowell (1996:4) criticize this form of notation as inappropriate notation that is often used to phrase poetry rather than scan it.
However, this robs them of their still potentially useful role in marking quantity (that is, the duration of syllables). In the accentual prosody of English verse, these marks are still sometimes used to represent stressed and unstressed syllables. A system for describing conventional rhythms by dividing lines into feet indicating the locations of accents and counting the syllables (marking the rhythm of the poem) SymbolĬlassical system adopted to English - macron and breve The classical marks for scansion came from the quantitative meter of classical prosody where long syllables were marked with a macron( ¯), and short syllables were marked with a breve ( ˘).
0 kommentar(er)
