Chaucer and the Study of Prosody

pattern which the poet has created or adopted, perhaps only in part consciously. The poet uses this pattern as a basis of selection so that he may choose out of the infinite number of sentences of natural language those which qualify for inclusion in the poem. In the verse of interest here the pattern consists in the regulation of two linguistically given properties, the number of syllables in a line and the placement in a line of syllables bearing linguistically given stress greater than that of adjacent syllables. Thus we begin with the assumption that stress placement is a relevant linguistic fact which is utilized by the English poet writing in the iambic pentameter tradition. (It is not, of course, the only linguistic given utilized by the poet.) We shall restrict our attention to stress placement and the number of syllables only insofar as they participate in the construction of a single line of verse. We shall not attempt in any systematic way to go beyond the single verse line to more complex structures.' Let us first turn our attention to the facts of English stress placement. In a word like celestial, a speaker of modern English knows that the primary stress is 1 on the second syllable, thus celestial and 1 not celestial. There are other facts about English stress which are also relevant for purposes of meter. Thus compound nouns Morris Halle is Professor of Linguistics and on the staff of the Research Laboratory of Elecironics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His published work is concentrated primarily in the area of phonology, particularly in the Slavic languages. The Chaucer study is a result of his long standing interest in problems of poetic form. Samuel Jay Keyser is Assistant Professor of English at Brandeis University. His major interests are in linguistics, the history of the English language, and the intersection of linguistics and literary study. 1While this article deals primarily with iambic pentameter, we have quoted on occasion relevant examples from certain of Chaucer's works written in iambic tetrameter, in particular the Romaunt of the Rose (RR), the Book of the Duchess (BD), and the House of Fame (HF). Abbreviations of titles throughout follow those of A Concordance to the Complete Works of Chaucer and to the Romaunt of the Rose compiled by John S. P. Tatlock and Arthur G. Kennedy (The Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1927). All quotations come from the Concordance from The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (Boston,