Special issue on verse structure and linguistic modelling: introductory notes

Abstract

Verse was first.Verse and its forms have always held the attention of linguists and other humanists. Just over the last seven years there have been meetings spotlighting metrics at the University of Essex (2015), the University of Tallinn (2017), the University of Stockholm (2018), the University of Padua (2022) and most relevant to this special issue, a full session on historical metrics at the 2021 International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICHEL 21) in Leiden. Academic publishers, too, have over the same span brought out major new titles devoted to matters historical and metrical – Neidorf et al. (2016), Weiskott (2016), Cornelius (2017), Russom (2017), Gunkel & Hackstein (2017), Donoghue (2018), Duffell (2018), Putter & Jefferson (2018) and Ryan (2019) would here be representative – and it does not seem coincidental that in the UK, the Poet Laureate has been busy of late translating The Owl and the Nightingale into contemporary English (Armitage 2021) – a work that accompanies the same writer's earlier re-rendering of Gawain and the Green Knight (2009). The English language, with its intricacies, its long history of use as a literary medium and its spectacular formal developments in both verse and prose, figures largely in many of these renewed descriptions and analyses.