Chapter 8 Operativeness of modern constraints in ancient verse grammar

The previous chapters have been devoted to the development of the modern grammar which is the main concern of this study. The grammar (as well as the five subgrammars) is modern in the sense that it captures the modern speaker’s scansion of classical Chinese verse. At the same time, the apparent ancient nature of the corpus implies the relevance of a historical dimension of the issue, which will be addressed in this chapter. We will be arguing that the constraints deployed in the modern grammars (to be simply referred to as the ‘modern constraints’ below) were all operative in the ancient verse grammar, and that it stands to reason that the core constraints crucial for the scansion of verse lines have remained unchanged all the way till the modern times.