Introduction

In order to get a proper grasp of the nature of French metrical poetry, it is necessary to be aware of an important result of linguistic research of the last century. It has been established that the phonetic form in which a word or affix is stored in the memory of a speaker of a language is often substantially different from the way the word is pronounced in an actual utterance. One of the earliest discussions of this fact is to be found in Edward Sapir's ‘The psychological reality of phonemes’, an article first published in French (Sapir 1933). Sapir reported that when speakers of American Indian languages were taught to write in their language, they would often depart radically from the sounds (phonemes) they were actually pronouncing. For example, at the end of words, Sapir's consultants would write vowels and consonants that they did not actually pronounce. On examining these spontaneous additions, Sapir established that they were not random errors of the learner, but reflected rather features of the grammatical structure of the language which were not realized phonetically in the pronunciation of the words, like [b] in the English noun iamb, which is pronounced in the related English adjective iambic.

Phonological research since 1933 has strongly confirmed the reality of these abstract representations, and it is now standardly assumed in the scientific study of languages that speakers have access to this abstract underlying representation of a word in addition to its actual pro- nunciation or surface representation.