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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton February 20, 2008

The phonology of Classical Greek meter

  • Chris Golston EMAIL logo and Tomas Riad EMAIL logo
From the journal Linguistics

Abstract

We propose an analysis of Greek meter based purely on phonology and the idea that well-formedness in meter is largely gradient, rather than absolute. Our analysis is surface-true, constraint-based and nonderivational, in line with proposals like optimality theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993). The discussion centers on two properties of meter, rhythm (dactylic, anapestic, iambic …) and line length (hexameter, pentameter, tetrameter …). Unmarked meters are expected to be binary (dimeter) and rhythmic (no clash or lapse). We analyze individual meters in terms of how they deviate from this unmarked state, where deviations (big and small) are encoded directly as constraint violations following Golston (1996). Greek anapests are shown to be unmarked in terms of rhythm, while dactyls distinctively violate the constraint NOCLASH and iambs distinctively violate NOLAPSE. Similarly, dimeter is unmarked in terms of binarity, while trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, and hexameter violate constraints on binarity.


1Correspondence address: Chris Golston, Department of Linguistics, California State University Fresno, Fresno, CA 93740, USA.
2Correspondence address: Tomas Riad, Department of Scandinavian Languages, Stockholm University, S-10691 Stockholm, Sweden.

Received: 1998-12-14
Revised: 1999-07-27
Published Online: 2008-02-20
Published in Print: 2000-05-01

© Walter de Gruyter

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