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  • Children's Verse and the Halle-Keyser Theory of Prosody
  • Jacqueline Guéron (bio)

In this paper I should like to show how a recent development in linguistics, namely the Halle-Keyser theory of prosody, has advanced the general theory of poetic forms.

Applying this theory to the study of English and French children's verse, I shall show how it permits us to state the rules governing individual meters, and, what is even more interesting, to reveal similarities between different meters.

In what follows I first state and illustrate the Halle-Keyser theory of prosody. I then give the rules governing the meter of English Nursery Rhymes and that of French comptines. Finally, I show how the theory allows us to treat these two meters as variants of a single underlying metrical pattern.

I. The Halle-Keyser Theory of Prosody.1

According to Morris Halle and Samuel Jay Keyser, a poetic meter can be considered as consisting of a simple abstract pattern plus a body of realization rules which determine what sequences of a language can be considered as realizations of the underlying pattern.

Here, for example, is the Abstract Metrical Pattern of iambic pentameter verse:2

V → (w) S w S w S w S w S (w) (w)

where V symbolizes "verse, " may be read "consists of" or "is rewritten as," w is a weak metrical position, S a strong metrical position, and the elements in parentheses may be omitted. And here are the Realization Rules which determine which segments of English discourse may be considered realizations of the underlying pattern:

1. A metric position corresponds to a single syllable, OR

to a sonorant sequence incorporating at most two vowels (either immediately adjoining or separated by a sonorant consonant).

DEFINITION: When a fully stressed syllable occurs between two unstressed syllables within a line of verse, this syllable is called a "stress maximum."3

2. Fully stressed syllables occur in S positions only and in all S positions, OR

fully stressed syllables occur in S positions only but not in all S positions, OR

stress maxima occur in S positions only but not in all S positions. [End Page 197]

The first alternative of each rule defines the most simple realization of the pattern. Thus the simplest possible iambic pentameter line consists of a ten-syllable sequence in which every strong position (S) is occupied by a stressed syllable in a segment of English discourse, and every weak position (w) is occupied by an unstressed syllable, as in the following example:

Such a line contains the maximum number of stress maxima (stressed syllables surrounded on either side by unstressed syllables). These are marked / above.

Whereas the first alternatives of Rules 1 and 2 give a simple iambic pentameter line, later alternatives of these rules give more complex realizations:

Here two S-positions do not contain stressed syllables: position 8 (and) and position 10 (me). Accordingly, there are only three stress maxima in this line and not four.

The underlined syllables above represent complex realizations of metrical positions. The first weak position is occupied by a stressed syllable, while the first strong position contains an unstressed syllable. We recognize an example of an "inverted foot." Whereas former theories of iambic pentameter could only consider this metrical figure as an "allowable exception" to the "rule," the Halle-Keyser theory gives a principled explanation for its occurrence. The reason the first weak position can contain a stressed syllable is that there is no other syllable preceding it. There is therefore no possibility of having a "stress maximum" in this position. (The rules of iambic pentameter permit a stress maximum in even position only.)

Similarly, the third weak position contains a stressed syllable (three). However, here it is the stressed syllable in the adjoining strong position (per) which prevents the occurrence of an unmetrical stress maximum in weak position. Line (3) is therefore a complex but metrical iambic pentameter.

The concept of the "stress maximum" is thus the principal criterion distinguishing metrical from unmetrical iambic pentameter lines. While the norm for this meter is an alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables, a certain deviation from the norm is accepted, up to a...

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