Phonological and Metrical Variation across Genres

Abstract

In this study, we asked whether standard phonological and metricalconstraints proposed by phonologists and metricists are useful inidentifying arbitrary lines of text as metered verse vs. unmeteredprose, focusing on five English-language and five Finnish-languageauthors. To analyze the dataset we used Prosodic (Heuser, Falk, andAnttila 2010), a software package that provides a phonologicalanalysis and a metrical scansion for raw text. We discovered thatphonologically prose and verse differ in the same way in bothlanguages, suggesting that the phonology of genre is universal,whereas metrically the two languages turned out to differ in theexpected ways.