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Prosodic Protocols And Interruptions Of Them In Piers Plowman, Ian Cornelius
Prosodic Protocols And Interruptions Of Them In Piers Plowman, Ian Cornelius
English: Faculty Publications and Other Works
In premodern societies artificial prosody supplied an encoding protocol for the transmission of sound in writing. Focusing on the fourteenth-century English poem Piers Plowman, this essay examines mid-stream interruption, modification, or blending of prosodic protocols. In most cases the interruption takes the form of a mid-line switch from English verse to Latin prose. In a few cases, the switch is from English verse to Latin verse. These interruptions of protocol are part of the formal artistry and multilingual facility of Piers Plowman, encoding a great range of sound and some silence. They prompt readers to re-evaluate well-justified expectations …
It’S Complicated: Some Irregular Line-Ending Morphosyllabic Sequences In Piers Plowman B, Ian Cornelius
It’S Complicated: Some Irregular Line-Ending Morphosyllabic Sequences In Piers Plowman B, Ian Cornelius
English: Faculty Publications and Other Works
Recent scholarship on the meter of fourteenth-century English alliterative verse demonstrates that lines end with a trochaic constituent. Piers Plowman is a recognized anomaly, yet there is disagreement about the extent of the differences. In this article, I examine long final dips, the vocalic quality of syllables in the final dip, and the placement of word divisions. Throughout, my focus is on the B version of the poem. I make a survey of lines with a word division after the final lift and of lines ending in -ly adverbs, compounds in -man, compounds in -nesse, nouns in -(i)oun …
Some Corrections To The Notation Of Verse Structure In Two Recent Editions Of Middle English Alliterative Poems, Ian Cornelius
Some Corrections To The Notation Of Verse Structure In Two Recent Editions Of Middle English Alliterative Poems, Ian Cornelius
English: Faculty Publications and Other Works
In Germanic alliterative verse the fundamental unit of meter and rhythm is the half-line. Editions of older Germanic alliterative poems now usually record this feature in their typographic design: the poetry is lineated and coordinate half-lines are separated with whitespace. For Middle English alliterative poems, the usual presentation has been in undivided long lines, but several recent editions separate half-lines with whitespace or punctuation-marks. The present essay examines the half-line divisions in John Burrow and Thorlac Turville-Petre’s Piers Plowman B (2014/2018) and Ad Putter and Myra Stokes’s Cleanness, Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2014). Burrow …
Language And Meter, Ian Cornelius
Language And Meter, Ian Cornelius
English: Faculty Publications and Other Works
From a visual standpoint as well as a semantic and functional one, Middle English lyrics were often absorbed into their co(n)texts. In what sense, then, is a “Middle English lyric” a thing? I seek in this essay to show what metrical analysis may contribute to that question. Context is not all. If contextual analysis has tended to dissolve the presumed thing-hood of Middle English lyrics, metrical analysis shows that verses are robust enough to sustain that. Metrical structuration sets verse apart from its surround; it defines the verse object as a distinct entity, distinguished by a specifiable compositional craft.