Blackwell Reference Online

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This chapter addresses the early history of English prosody. Prosody is used here to mean the study of the suprasegmental phenomena of speech, such as syllabicity, stress, intonation, and juncture. Our focus will be primarily on word stress. The terms meter and metrical will be applied to the properties of the verse template, including ictus, foot type (trochee, iamb), and lineation. Much of our historical knowledge of the prosody of English depends on verse evidence; the reconstruction of the forms of verse, on the other hand, rests on assumptions about the prosodic system. To avoid circularity, we will seek support from independently attested historical linguistic facts and typological observations. Departing from the analyses dominant in the specialized literature of the last decade (e.g. McCully and Hogg 1990 ; Moon 1996 ; Gąsiorowski 1997 ; Hutton 1998a, 1998b ; Getty 2002 ), Old English (OE) stress will be treated here as morphologically determined, in the spirit of more traditional accounts, of which the sections on stress in the Cambridge History of the English Language , volume 1 ( Hogg 1992 : 98–9) and volume 2 ( Lass 1992 : 85–6) are representative. On our starting point there is no disagreement: main stress in Old English was placed on the first syllable of the root of major class words: (1) bére ‘barley’ gánian ‘to yawn’ betwéox ‘between’ gúttas ‘entrails’ ... log in or subscribe to read full text