Gradient syllable weight and weight universals in quantitative metrics*

Homeric Greek, Kalevala Finnish, Old Norse andMiddle Tamil are all languages in which weight is claimed to be exclusively binary in the poetic metrics. As I demonstrate through corpus studies of these traditions, the poets were sensitive to additional grades of weight, such that finely articulated continua of syllable weight can be inferred from distributional asymmetries in the metres. Across all four languages, the scales are strongly correlated (for example, in each, C0V<C0VC<C0VV<C0VVC). These language-internal scales reflect the crosslinguistic typology of categorical weight criteria, providing new evidence for weight universals. A metrical grammar is proposed in a maximum entropy constraint framework in which categorical and scalar/gradient constraints interact to generate the weight-mapping typology.