Following classical antiquity, European poetic meter was complicated by traditions negotiating between the prosodic stress of vernacular dialects and a classical system based on syllable length. Middle High German (MHG) epic poetry found a solution in a hybrid qualitative and quantitative meter. We develop a CRF model to predict the metrical values of syllables in MHG epic verse, achieving an Fscore of .894 on 10-fold cross-validated development data (outperforming several baselines) and .904 on held-out testing data. The method used in this paper presents itself as a viable option for other literary traditions, and as a tool for subsequent genre or author analysis.

The Levene mechanism to maintain genotypic polymorphism by opposing selection on genotypes in multiple niches was proposed 60 years ago, and yet no systems were found to satisfy the mechanism's rather restrictive conditions. Reported here is such an example that a wolf spider population lives in a habitat of mixed rocks and leafy litter for which the females are phenotypically indistinguishable and the males have two distinct phenotypes subject to opposing selection with respect to the substrates. Census data is best-fitted to a population genetics model of the Levene type. A majority of the best fit support polymorphism, with many fitted parameter values quantitatively consistent with various laboratory studies on two closely related species.

Middle High German (MHG) epic poetry presents a unique solution to the linguistic changes underpinning the transition from classical Latin poetry, based on syllable length, into later vernacular rhythmic poetry, based on phonological stress. The predominating pattern in MHG verse is the alternation between stressed and unstressed syllables, but syllable length also plays a crucial role. There are a total of eight possible metrical values. Single or half mora syllables can carry any one of three types of stress, resulting in six combinations. The seventh value is a double mora, i.e., a long stressed syllable. The eighth value is an elided syllable. We construct a supervised Conditional Random Field (CRF) model to predict the metrical value of syllables, and subsequently investigate medieval German poets' use of semantic and sonorous emphasis through meter. The features used are: (1) the syllable's position within the line, (2) the syllable's length in characters, (3) the syllable's characters, (4) elision (last two characters of previous syllable and first two characters of focal syllable), (5) syllable weight, and (6) word boundaries. Additional metrical rules are enforced and marginal probabilities are calculated to yield the most likely legal scansion of a line. The model achieves a weighted average F-score of 0.925 on internal cross-validation and 0.909 on held-out testing data. We determine that trochaic alternation with a one syllable anacrusis and words carrying clear stress assignment are the easiest for the model to scan. Lines with multiple double morae of syllables with few characters are the most difficult. We then rank all the epic poetry in the Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdatenbank (MHDBDB) by the difficulty of the meter. Finally, we investigate the double mora, which MHG poets used to draw attention to chosen concepts. We conclude that poets generally chose to use the double mora to emphasize highly sonorant words.

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