Prosody and Prosodies

In borrowing W. Sidney Allen's phrase (1966) for the heading of this section, I mean to indicate an emphasis more general than his. As Allen and others have shown, the notion of what is properly designated by the term prosody has varied considerably from ancient times to the present. In this chapter and throughout these studies, I use the term in its widest possible application to refer to all of the "elements and structures involved in the rhythmic or dynamic aspect of speech, and the study of these elements and structures as they occur... in the compositions of the literary arts"; this so-called literary prosody thus "studies the rhythmic structure of prose and verse, not as exemplifying linguistic norms but as functioning ... as an aspect of poetic form" (La Drière 1974, 669). We may therefore list among our possible interests not only meter per se, but also alliteration, rhyme, assonance and consonance, stress, tone, hiatus, juncture and elision, and, in general, sound patterns of any sort. There will also be reason to touch on allied linguistic phenomena, such as syntax and morphology, as they relate to prosodic features, although most of our discussion of these last two areas belongs in the chapters on formulaic structure.

Within this large field of prosodic possibilities the chief emphasis will continue to be on those particular properties of the verse that are most important to the structure and deployment of phraseology and therefore to traditional narrative design. The first narrowing of focus, then, is from prosody as the set of all possible metrical and euphonic factors to traditional prosody , the more restricted set of factors involved in traditional form and dynamics. Additionally, this second and more refined set of characteristics will vary considerably from one poetry to another; in fact, there is evidence within the three traditions treated in these studies that prosody is genre-dependent as well as tradition-dependent.^[22] In Old English, for instance, alliteration

between paired half-lines is not a desideratum but a requirement: without agreement of these initial sounds bridging the gap, one does not have a viable metrical line. (For example, "B eowulf mapelode, / b earn Ecgpeowes" ["Beowulf spoke, son of Ecgtheow"; Beowulf 529 et seq.: alliteration in b ]; and "G rendel g ongan, / G odes yrre bær" ["Grendel going, he bore God's wrath"; Beowulf 7 11: alliteration in g ].)

But while absence of this prosodic feature in Beowulf calls for emendation of the manuscript text, its absence in a Serbo-Croatian or ancient Greek epic line is no violation at all, not even (necessarily) of euphonic propriety. In the latter two traditions, alliteration may constitute a sound-pattern,^[23] but it is not in any way required. In contrast, rhyme of the end of the first with the end of the second colon, or leonine rhyme, is a fairly common phraseological feature in Yugoslav epic; perhaps more importantly, lines that manifest this end-colon (as opposed to end-line) rhyme only rarely show variation from one occurrence to the next.^[24] (Examples of leonine rhyme in the deseterac include, for instance, "I danica da pomoli lice " ["And the morning star shows its face"] and "U becara^[*] nema hizmecara^[*] " ["A bachelor has no helpmate"].) These facts allow us to assign a compositional status to this euphonic feature in the deseterac ; although obviously not a requirement, leonine rhyme is for our purposes a significant prosodic element because it plays a part in formula-shaping and, apparently, in maintaining formulaic shape over time. Prosodic features other than meter, or at least those usually classed as euphonic, seem less important in Greek, but, as Parry (1928a, in 1971, 68-74) showed long ago and Nagler (1974, 1-63) has illustrated more recently in some detail, agreement in sound provides a basis for analogy in Homer. Nagler gives many examples of what he calls "phonemic corresponsions," among which we may cite the following six, all of which occur in the adonean clausula (or final two metra) of the hexameter (1974, 8):

These acoustically related elements—pioni dêmôi ("[amid] the flourishing populace"), together with the others—argue, Nagler feels, for phonemic relationships that operate outside of the usual formulaic context. Again we encounter a prosaic feature that contributes to traditional structure.

The instances cited so far arc few, and we shall need to consider many more at length below. But perhaps enough has been said to indicate that when speaking of "prosody" and "prosodies," two avenues of differentiation must be kept in mind. The fine is the acknowledged bias of these studies toward analysis of those factors which affect traditional structures. The second has to do with the varying set of pertinent factors for a given individual tradition—with, in short, the tradition-dependence of prosody.