The prosodic word as a unit in poetic meter

The epic decasyllable is a traditional South Slavic folk metrical form. The poems created in this rich oral tradition are of a highly formulaic nature, and possess a discernible metrical organization. My focus will be on the so-called Serbo-Croatian poems within this tradition (cf. Maretić 1907, 1935, Jakobson 1933, 1952), which have been documented in numerous volumes of verse. Among the most notable are the five volumes of Serbian epic poetry collected and published by Vuk Karadžić between 1814 and 1847, which will be the principal basis of this study. Although extensively documented, this verse form has eluded clear characterization. Each line of the epic decasyllable has ten metrical positions, with a caesura after the fourth, which divides it into two cola. A metrical position corresponds, strictly, to a syllable, while colon boundaries coincide with word breaks.