| ROA: | 119 |
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| Title: | Folk Verse Form in English |
| Authors: | Bruce Hayes, Margaret MacEachern |
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| Abstract: | Folk Verse Form in English ROA-119 folk.rtf Bruce Hayes & Margaret MacEachern UCLA bhayes@humnet.ucla.edu maceache@humnet.ucla.edu The paper described here is primarily about metrics, but may be of interest to optimality theorists in general. We examine the inventory of possible quatrains in the verse of English folksongs. The data focus is on the distribution of truncated lines (empty positions at the end of the metrical grid) within the quatrain. We attempt to explain why only about 25 of the 625 logical possibilities for quatrain structure are well formed. Our assumption is that the anonymous composers of folk songs internalize a set of conflicting well-formed constraints. Some require empty positions near the end of the line, with the goal of enhancing the saliency of units like couplets and lines. Others, part of metrics proper, demand that the metrical grid of the line be filled with syllables. The diversity of quatrain types is held to follow from the large number of ways in which these constraints may be ranked against one another. Thus the outcome of our analysis is not any particular ranking of the constraints, but rather the entire factorial typology. We extend our analysis to account for two further matters: the greatly differing corpus frequencies of the various quatrain types, and the existence of quatrains that sound only partially well formed. Corpus frequencies are modeled by assigning each constraint a range of possible strictness values, in arbitrary units. A simulation program calculates the expected frequencies in a large hypothetical corpus of quatrains, under the assumption that each quatrain is generated by a random setting of all the constraints within their respective strictness ranges. By locating appropriate strictness ranges, we can model the corpus frequencies fairly accurately. These strictness ranges are then used as the basis for a model of gradient well-formedness judgments: we claim that the strictness ranges of certain constraints are partitioned into central and peripheral subranges. Any form that may be derived only by ranking a constraint within its peripheral subrange will sound only partially well-formed. In informal terms, a given form is judged as semi-acceptable when the consultant's internalized grammar must be slightly "bent out of shape" in order to generate it. Following this hypothesis, we have been able to formulate an explicit analysis for the semi-well- formedness of a number of quatrain types. At the moment we are fairly enthusiastic about this approach to semi-well-formedness, since it requires no "fuzziness" within the constraint system itself, but only within the rankings, which can easily be treated numerically, hence gradiently. We are curious if this method could be applied to the many other areas of linguistics where gradient well-formedness judgments prevail. ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::;:::: |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
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| Article: | Version 1 |