Word order and poetic style: auxiliary and verbal in The Metres of Boethius (original) (raw)
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The Evolution of Verse Structure in Old and Middle English Poetry
The Evolution of Verse Structure in Old and Middle English Poetry
This chapter surveys predictable developments in alliterative meter after Beowulf, which was probably composed around ad 700. 1 The most important evidence for these developments comes from The Battle of Maldon, a late Old English poem about one-tenth the size of Beowulf. Our language-based theory makes many predictions and testing them systematically can compensate for a smaller body of evidence. Suppose, for example, that the theory predicts an increase in frequency for a variant with an extrametrical word. If Beowulf provides one instance of the variant, one instance in Maldon will represent a tenfold increase in frequency. Since Maldon provides only one instance, however, the frequency rise might be due to chance. This kind of prediction has limited weight on its own, like the prediction that a flipped coin will land heads-up. Predicting that a coin will land heads-up nineteen times out of twenty is quite a different matter. 2 Making the correct prediction for a variety of cases can validate a theory even if each prediction has limited weight. An array of predictions is questionable if the researcher has ignored an important false prediction or has failed to make a prediction explicit enough for proper testing (has failed, in technical idiom, to make the prediction falsifiable). From a statistical point of view, however, what matters is the probability of chance occurrence for the whole array of successful predictions. Poetic universals provide additional help in dealing with a small corpus. The principle of closure makes it possible to deduce the complexity of a verse pattern from its placement within the line. The universal principle of "interest" provides help of a different kind. 3 We would expect Old English poets to use complex types at appropriate frequencies for metrical variety, with frequent return to the norm for metrical coherence. As Ruth Lehmann pointed out, the Beowulf poet does exactly that, pairing the optimal type A1 with a more complex verse pattern in a typical line. 4 For Late Old English Meter to Middle English Meter
Words into Verse: The Localization of Some Metrical Word-Types in the Iambic Trimeter of Sophocles
Illinois Classical Studies, 1998
This paper proposes to lay some necessary groundwork for the study of word order in the tragic trimeter. When at OT 122-23 we hear or read Creon's lines,^p oTaq ecpaoKE ouviuxovtaq ou ma pcburi Kxaveiv viv, dX?ia aw nA.ri0Ei xepuv, we may well come to the conclusion-in fact we should-that JirioTotq and |iia are highly salient words here, reinforced in the next line by ouv nki\Qt\ Xepcov. Nothing controversial so far. But are we also entitled to associate the salience of these two words with their position at the extremes of the trimeter line? In this paper I will propose that, in fact, there is little evidence to support such an association. I will argue elsewhere that there are other good reasons to consider "Kv^oxaq and |iia formally marked as salient,' but here I will begin to investigate whether a position at the beginning or the very end of a line constitutes such formal marking. It is inevitable that the discussion of this issue involves a certain amount of number crunching. But this foundation will, I hope, allow us to come to a better understanding of the spoken verse of classical tragedy.
This study argues that Anglo-Saxon scribes copied Old English verse to different standards of accuracy depending on the nature of the context in which they were working. Taking as its sample all metrically regular Old English poems known to have survived in more than one twelfth-century or earlier witness, it divides this corpus into three main contextual groups, each of which exhibits a characteristic pattern of substantive textual variation. Chapter Two examines “Glossing, Translating, and Occasional” poems. These texts are generally short, are found in primarily non-poetic contexts, and appear to have been transmitted independently of their surrounding context. They also all show a high level of substantive textual accuracy. At their most accurate, the scribes responsible for copying the surviving witnesses to these poems show themselves to have been able to reproduce their common texts with little or no variation in vocabulary, word order, or syntax – and preserve this accuracy even in the face of a corrupt common exemplar or thoroughgoing dialectal translation. The substantive variants the witnesses to these texts do show tend either to be obvious mistakes or to have a relatively insignificant effect on sense, syntax, and metre. Apparently significant inflectional differences more often than not can be attributed to graphic error, orthographic difference, or phonological change. Verbal substitutions are rare and almost invariably involve words which look alike and have similar meanings. Examples of the addition or omission of words and elements either destroy the sense of the passage in which they occur, or involve unstressed and syntactically unimportant sentence particles. Chapter Three looks at the poems preserved in “Fixed Contexts” – as constituents of larger vernacular prose framing texts such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Old English translation of the Pastoral Care, and the Old English translation of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica. With the exception of a single, late witness to the Old English Historia, these poems are found in exactly the same contextual position in each surviving witness. The Battle of Brunanburh is always found in manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; the Metrical Preface to the Old English Pastoral Care survives only in manuscripts of Alfred’s translation. In contrast to the Glossing, Translating, and Occasional poems discussed in Chapter Two, the Fixed Context poems differ greatly in the amount and types of textual variation they exhibit. At their most conservative, the scribes of the surviving witnesses to these texts produce copies as accurate as the least variable Glossing, Translating, and Occasional poems; the scribes of other witnesses, however, show themselves to be far more willing to introduce substantive changes of vocabulary and inflection. In either case the amount and nature of the variation introduced is directly comparable to the substantive textual variation found in the surrounding prose. Scribes who show themselves to have been innovative copyists of the prose texts in which these poems are found, also invariably produce innovative copies of the poems themselves; scribes who produce conservative copies of the poetic texts, on the other hand, are responsible for the most conservative texts of the surrounding frame. The third standard of accuracy is exhibited by the “Anthologised and Excerpted” poems discussed in Chapter Four. These poems differ from the Glossing, Translating, and Occasional poems of Chapter Two and the Fixed Context poems of Chapter Three in both the nature of the contexts in which they are found and the amount and significance of the substantive variation they exhibit. Unlike the texts discussed in the preceding chapters, the Anthologised and Excerpted poems show evidence of the intelligent involvement of the persons first responsible for collecting or excerpting them in their surviving witnesses. Like the greater part of the corpus of Old English poetry as a whole – but unlike the poems discussed in Chapters Two and Three – these texts all survive with at least one witness in a compilation or anthology. In four out of the six cases, their common text shows signs of having been excerpted from, inserted into, or joined with other prose or verse texts in one or another witness. Where the variation exhibited by the poems discussed in Chapters Two and Three was to be explained only on the grounds of the personal interests, abilities, or difficulties of the scribes responsible for the tradition leading up to each of the surviving witnesses, that exhibited by the witnesses to the Anthologised and Excerpted poems frequently can be explained on contextual grounds – and often involves the introduction of metrically, lexically or syntactically coordinated variants at different places in the common text. This argument has some important implications for our understanding of the transmission of Old English poetry. In the first place, it suggests that there was no single style of Old English poetic transmission. Since Sisam first asked “Was the poetry accurately transmitted?” scholars examining variation in the transmission of Old English verse texts have tended to assume they were investigating a single phenomenon – that is to say, have assumed that, a few late, early, or otherwise exceptional examples aside, all Old English poems showed pretty much the same kinds of textual variation, whether this variation be the result of “error,” or the application of “oral” or “formulaic” ways of thinking. The evidence presented here, however, suggests that the scribes themselves worked far less deterministically. Rather than copying “the poetry” to any single standard of substantive accuracy, the scribes seem instead to have adjusted their standards to suit the demands of the context in which the specific poem they were copying was to appear. When the wording of their text was important – as it was when the poem was being copied as a gloss or translation – the scribes reproduced their exemplars more or less word-for-word. When the relationship between their text and its surrounding context was paramount – as it appears to have been in the case of the Anthologised and Excerpted poems – the evidence of the surviving witnesses suggests that the persons responsible for transmitting these texts were more willing to adjust sense, syntax, and metre. When other factors
Initial Position in the Middle English Verse Line
English Studies, 2014
This paper establishes that spelling forms collected from initial position in the Middle English verse line have unique characteristics, and it discusses why this is so. The paper first addresses scribal copying practices, before describing the utility of letter-based N-gram models in objectively comparing scribal copies in terms of their spelling. Testing of models trained on a corpus totalling ten manuscripts demonstrates that initial position regularly prompted scribes to suppress their tendency to introduce their own spelling forms in favour of replicating those encountered in their exemplars. The discussion attributes this behaviour to the operation of two mechanisms. One mechanism is psycholinguistic in origin, while the other is rooted in manuscripts' production and so implies a codicological dimension to spelling variation. Something is different about initial position in the verse line. Scholars seasoned in compiling spelling profiles from Middle English manuscripts will nod in acknowledgement. It will be their experience, like it is my own, that spelling forms collected from this position often stand out in a profile. The observation merits empirical verification and a testable explanation. It was a deliberate strategy on the part of late medieval English scribes not invariably to aim at producing a carbon copy of their exemplars in respect of spelling forms. Scribes felt free to introduce their own spelling forms into the copy they were producing. The reason that departures from the exemplars were possible was the absence of normative spelling conventions during the period. The writing system was variable with no individual spelling form regarded as the standard or canonical form, and it was by no means unusual for a scribe to command more than one spelling form for any one word. Nevertheless, it was not an unchecked process that saw scribes effect these departures. Two types of mechanism are recognised in the literature as having led to a suspension of the "translation" process. The first mechanism responds to properties of the verse being copied. It operated in cases where replication of a spelling form
Review of P. Dainotti, Word Order and Expressiveness in the Aeneid (2015)
Classical Review 69.2, 455-57, 2019
The admiration many readers feel for Virgil's word order was expressed by J. Dryden in the preface of his translation of C.-A. du Fresnoy's work on the art of painting: 'Virgil is so exact in every word, that none can be changed but for a worse; nor any one removed from its place, but the harmony will be altered' (The Art of Painting [1695], p. xlix). D.'s work is the first book-length study of word order in Virgil, and of any Latin poet since H.D. Naylor's Horace Odes and Epodes: a Study in Poetic Word-Order (1922). It is a revised and expanded version of D.'s doctoral thesis (Università degli Studi di Salerno, 2012), produced partly under the guidance of G.B. Conte, and it has been translated into English by A. Campbell. Its focus is on the Aeneid, though quotations from other Virgilian works are abundant and helpful, and it concentrates particularly on aesthetic phenomena, especially that work mimetically or rather, in D.'s more precise Peircean terminology, iconically. Surprisingly perhaps, many of these effects are not conventionally harmonious at all, but work by being ostentatiously off-kilter or deviating from an expected pattern of some kind. For instance, enjambement, the phenomenon to which D. gives the most attention, works by dislocating a sense unit across a verse break. Other prosodic and metrical effects that D. considers work similarly, for example hiatus and hypermeter, by breaking established norms. Even a golden line (A B C B A), which seems visually so harmonious, violates norms that operate at a different linguistic layer, namely the syntactic constraints that structure typical Latin word order. D.'s attention to the aesthetic dimension of word order distinguishes it from recent Anglophone work on Latin (and ancient Greek) word order, for instance, by A.M. Devine and L.D. Stephens, B.L.M. Bauer, and A. Ledgeway. Instead, D. works largely within a framework and terminology that should be familiar to most Classicists: 'hyperbaton', 'anastrophe' and 'emphasis' instead of, for example, 'discontinuity', 'long-distance fronting' and 'focus'. This makes the work accessible to a wide range of Classicists and demonstrates the continued hermeneutic value of these concepts in the hands of a sensitive reader. One advantage of the familiar terminology is its ancient pedigree: through Servius and Quintilian it takes us back perhaps as close as we can get to the vocabulary in which Virgil himself probably understood his poetic creation. For describing enjambement and other effects that cluster around verse breaks, D. persuasively advocates adopting two concepts from M. Grammont (Le vers français [2nd edn 1913]): rejet and contre-rejet. Both help to describe the aesthetic tension between the metrical unit of the verse and the syntactic unit of the sentence. Rejet occurs when a single word has overstepped the boundary of the metrical verse and been projected, or enjambed, onto the following verse, and is then followed by a pause (p. 58). Contre-rejet describes the mirror image of this, when the sentence ends before the verse does, and a new sentence begins shortly before verse-end. D. also introduces a third term of his own, après-rejet, which describes the start of a new sentence immediately after rejet. This toolkit of vocabulary helps D. to break new ground in his description of enjambement and related phenomena and their interaction with metrical structure and semantic content.
Three-Position Verses and the Metrical Pratice of the Beowulf Poet
This article assesses the authenticity of the three-position SS verse type in Beowulf on the basis of its unambiguous incidence both in Beowulf and in a larger corpus of Old English poetry. The first part of this essay examines the metrical configuration of thirteen verses from Beowulf that have recently been identified as instances of the SS pattern. In doing so, it demonstrates that nearly all of them furnish a standard four-position metrical structure. The second part discusses the empirical obstacles to accepting the formal legitimacy of the three-position SS pattern in Old English verse, thereby reaffirming the validity of the stricture of traditional Sieversian metrics against verses consisting of less than four metrical positions.