Towards a Typology of Poetic Forms
From language to metrics and beyond
Editors
| Université Paris 8
| Université de Nantes
Metrics is often defined as a discipline that concerns itself with the study of meters. In this volume the term is used in a broader sense that more or less coincides with the traditional notion of “versification”. Understood this way, metrics is an eminently complex object that displays variation over time and in space, that concerns forms of a great variety and with different statuses (meters, rhymes, stanzas, prescribed forms, syllabification rules, nursery rhymes, slogans, musical textsetting, ablaut reduplication etc.), and that as a cultural manifestation is performed in a variety of ways (sung, chanted, spoken, read) that can have direct consequences on how it is structured. This profusion of forms is thought to correspond, at the level of perception, to a limited number of cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and to represent regularly iterating forms. This volume proposes a relatively coherent overall vision by distinguishing four main families of metrical forms, each clearly independent of the others and amenable to separate typologies.
[Language Faculty and Beyond, 2] 2009. xiv, 428 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
Contributors
|
vii–xii
|
Acknowledgments
|
xiii–xiv
|
1–40
|
|
Part I. Isochronous metrics
|
|
43–62
|
|
63–78
|
|
79–100
|
|
101–122
|
|
123–142
|
|
143–164
|
|
Part II. Prosodic metrics
|
|
167–192
|
|
193–208
|
|
209–228
|
|
229–246
|
|
247–266
|
|
267–286
|
|
287–304
|
|
Part III. Para-metrical phenomena
|
|
307–324
|
|
325–334
|
|
Part IV. Macrostructural metrics
|
|
337–354
|
|
355–370
|
|
371–384
|
|
385–402
|
|
Persons index
|
403–410
|
Languages index
|
411–414
|
Subjects index
|
415–428
|
“The authors and editors of this book [...] hold that, in terms of how people perceive verse, there are but a limited number of cognitive patterns. Their book represents an attempt to open up discussion of versification along such lines. It aims at "getting the debate off the ground" in the words of Aroui, one of the two co-editors, rather than "proposing a unified and rigorously falsifiable theory", but nevertheless, despite this understandable admission, the present work is one of the most important books on poetic metre published in the past few years.”
Jonathan Roper, University of Tartu, Estonia, in Folklore 122, August 2011
“The diversity of the field of metrics requires people to define their categories, and make them comparable with the work of others. With its content divided into motivated thematic sections, this volume should help in achieving just that. This is a truly good thing.”
Tomas Riad, Stockholm University
“There are very few books of high quality in the field of metrical study, and even fewer which bring together leading experts focusing on specific problems of verse-form; this wide-ranging volume is therefore to be warmly welcomed.”
Derek Attridge, University of York
Cited by
Cited by 3 other publications
Aroui, Jean-Louis
2007.
B. Elan Dresner et Nila Friedberg, dir. Formal approaches to poetry : Recent developments in metrics. In the series Phonology and Phonetics
11. Berlin/New York : Mouton de Gruyter. 2006. Pp. viii + 314. 132,30 $ US (relié)..
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 52:3 ► pp. 313 ff. 
Noel Aziz Hanna, Patrizia
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 07 january 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
Subjects
BIC Subject: CFH – Phonetics, phonology
BISAC Subject: LAN009000 – LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General