In retrospect

This study mainly addresses two questions: (i) what is the verse grammar that governs the modern speaker’s scansion of classical Chinese verse lines? (ii) how can his apparently intuitive judgment of metrical harmony of verse lines be accounted for in a principled way? For the first question, we have argued that the modern verse grammar represents the coexistence of five minimally different sub-grammars respectively for the five genres. Formally, the grammar is couched as a partial ranking order on a set of constraints which is instantiable into five full ranking orders. The partial ranking order features one ranking skeleton shared by all the five sub-grammars and one floating constraint ANCHOR that can land in several specified positions along the ranking skeleton. The different landing sites of this floating constraint give rise to various instantiations of this grammar, i.e., various sub-grammars. That the subgrammars are minimally different is captured by the fact that on the one hand, they all share one ranking skeleton and on the other hand, only one constraint floats with its possible landing sites restricted. The representation of the grammar as such also points to the formal elegance and explanatory adequacy of the floating constraints model, when restricted in a certain way, in dealing with variation.