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Gradient syllable weight and weight universals in quantitative metrics*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 December 2011

Kevin M. Ryan
Kevin M. Ryan
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Abstract

Homeric Greek, Kalevala Finnish, Old Norse and Middle Tamil are all languages in which weight is claimed to be exclusively binary in the poetic metrics. As I demonstrate through corpus studies of these traditions, the poets were sensitive to additional grades of weight, such that finely articulated continua of syllable weight can be inferred from distributional asymmetries in the metres. Across all four languages, the scales are strongly correlated (for example, in each, C0V<C0VC<C0VV<C0VVC). These language-internal scales reflect the cross-linguistic typology of categorical weight criteria, providing new evidence for weight universals. A metrical grammar is proposed in a maximum entropy constraint framework in which categorical and scalar/gradient constraints interact to generate the weight-mapping typology.

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Phonology , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , December 2011 , pp. 413 - 454
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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