Chaucer and the Study of Prosody.

Description: Explores the assumptions about stress that underlie prosodic scansion, and demonstrates that Chaucer's decasyllabic verse is built upon a contrastive rather than an absolute distinction between stressed and unstressed syllables. Considers elision, the pronunciation of final-"e," the influence of French accent, and Chaucer's artful manipulations of various "conditions" of spoken Middle English, drawing examples for various works.