The Metrics of Children's Verse: A Cross-Linguistic Study

Burling, Robbins

doi:10.1525/aa.1966.68.6.02a00040

Cited by 47 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…A poetic meter can be viewed as a metrical grid to which the stress grid in the text is optimally aligned (Halle & Keyser, 1971). Especially in vernacular genres of poetry such as nursery rhymes and limericks, the metrical grid is performed quasi-isochronously, as in music -even to the point of having rests (silent beats) in the grid (Burling, 1966;Oehrle, 1989). 4 Fig .…”

Section: Metrical Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

The capacity for music: What is it, and what’s special about it?

2006

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We explore the capacity for music in terms of five questions: (1) What cognitive structures are invoked by music? (2) What are the principles that create these structures? (3) How do listeners acquire these principles? (4) What pre-existing resources make such acquisition possible? (5) Which aspects of these resources are specific to music, and which are more general?We examine these issues by looking at the major components of musical organization: rhythm (an interaction of grouping and meter), tonal organization (the structure of melody and harmony), and affect (the interaction of music with emotion). Each domain reveals a combination of cognitively general phenomena, such as gestalt grouping principles, harmonic roughness, and stream segregation, with phenomena that appear special to music and language, such as metrical organization. These are subtly interwoven with a residue of components that are devoted specifically to music, such as the structure of tonal systems and the contours of melodic tension and relaxation that depend on tonality. In the domain of affect, these components are especially tangled, involving the interaction of such varied factors as general-purpose aesthetic framing, communication of affect by tone of voice, and the musically specific way that tonal pitch contours evoke patterns of posture and gesture.

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Section: Metrical Structurementioning

confidence: 99%

The capacity for music: What is it, and what’s special about it?

2006

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“…Recent work in metrics has uncovered a recurrent pattern of binarity among most meters (Burling 1966;Hayes 1988, and this binarity seems to extend all the way up the prosodic hierarchy (Helsloot 1995(Helsloot , 1997Golston 1998;Getty 1998). The prosodic hierarchy includes the phonological foot (w), the prosodic word ( Wd), the phonological phrase (Ph), and the intonational phrase (Int).3 With these four levels of structure we get a basic phonological structure with eight feet, four words, two phrases and one intonational phrase.…”

Section: Poetic Metermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…I believe instead that it is rather a mode that many English speakers never master and that probably always has to be explicitly taught. All English speakers probably master the fourbeat line with no special instruction, and that would seem to make it the more ''natural'' verse form (Burling 1966(Burling : 1426.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The phonology of Classical Greek meter

Golston¹,

Riad²

2000

Linguistics

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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 ...). Golston (1996) 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

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“…This appears to be a widespread pattern in children's rhymes, especially if a musical rest is allowed to be transcribed for a beat (Burling, 1966). Ten of the 12 most frequent Romanian rhymes and 7 of the 14 less common rhymes had four lines.…”

Section: Properties Ofthe 26 Rhymesmentioning

confidence: 97%

Children’s memory for counting-out rhymes: A cross-language comparison

Rubin

Ciobanu

Langston

1997

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

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In English, counting-out rhymes, such as "Eenie Meenie,"vary little over retellings. Recall is not rote but is sensitive to the structure of the genre. To test the generality of this finding, a sample of Romanian rhymes was collected. Although there was no overlap with the English rhymes, the corpus of rhymes collected had similar structure in terms of number of lines, repeating words, rhyme, alliteration, and the inclusion of nonsense words. Variation within rhymes preserved the poetic structure of the genre. The results suggest that verbatim recall can be schema driven ifthere is sufficient structure.

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The Metrics of Children's Verse: A Cross-Linguistic Study

Cited by 47 publications

References 8 publications

The capacity for music: What is it, and what’s special about it?

The capacity for music: What is it, and what’s special about it?

The phonology of Classical Greek meter

Children’s memory for counting-out rhymes: A cross-language comparison

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