A PHONETICIAN’S VIEW OF VERSE STRUCTURE

May I say, right away, that my interest in prosody, in the study of verse structure, is not an amateur's interest.* I would like to claim prosody as part of my own subject, phonetics; and I would therefore assert that my interest in prosody is a professional one. It is true that, in fact, most phoneticians have paid little attention to verse structure. Most writers on prosody, moreover, have paid little attention to phonetics, which is possibly why they have never reached any agreement on a common body of knowledge. I claim prosody as part of my subject, because verse is verse as a result of the way certain aspects of the sound, or rather perhaps the soundproducing movements, of speech have been exploited or organised. The study of the sound of speech, in all its aspects, and of the bodily movements which produce the sound, is the province of phonetics. Phonetic techniques of observation and analysis can be applied to verse structure as successfully as they can to any other aspect of language where the sound is important. I would like to start, therefore, with that part of elementary phonetic theory which is relevant to our present purpose. Speech, as is well known, depends on breathing: the sounds of speech are produced by an air-stream from the lungs. This air-stream does not issue from the lungs in a continuous flow, as might be thought at first. The flow is "pulse-like": there is a continuous and rapid fluctuation in the air-pressure, which results from alternate contractions and relaxations of the breathing muscles. Each muscular contraction, and consequent rise in air-pressure, is a chest-pulse (so called because it is the intercostal muscles in the chest that are responsible); and each chestpulse constitutes a syllable. This syllable-producing process, the system of chest-pulses, is the basis of human speech. This, however, is not the whole story of the production of the air-