Reconsidering Chaucer's Prosody

Author / Editor
Youmans, Gilbert.

Title
Reconsidering Chaucer's Prosody

Published
C. B. McCully and J. J. Anderson, eds. English Historical Metrics (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 185-209.

Description
Reexamines Halle and Keyser's three principles of the iambic line as applied to Chaucer's verse, arguing that the verse is better explained by a prototypical hierarchy of stresses than by a pattern of alternating weak and strong stresses. Kiparsky's Monosyllabic Word Constraint Principle better explains Chaucer's (and Shakespeare's and Milton's) inversions for meter than does Halle and Keyser's Stress Maximum Principle.

Alternative Title
English Historical Metrics.

Chaucer Subjects
Style and Versification.