Speaker: Aljoa Milenkovi? (Harvard) and Kevin Ryan (Harvard)
Title: Stress-weight and stress-tone interaction in South Slavic folk verse
Time: Monday, September 15th, 5pm – 6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract: We analyze the distribution of stress, tone and syllable weight in the epic decasyllable, a traditional verse form of South Slavic folk poetry. The meter imposes strict distributional constraints on tone and
weight in stressed syllables. The stress-modulated nature of tone and weight mapping places the epic
decasyllable in the category of hybrid meters of the interactive type (in the sense of Ryan 2017). The
contribution is twofold: we demonstrate that hybrid meters can display multiple interactive mappings in
parallel (in this case, stress-weight and stress-tone) and offer evidence for stress-tone interaction,
previously undocumented in hybrid meters. This is also, to our knowledge, the first demonstration of
tone-sensitivity in an Indo-European meter. We provide a MaxEnt model for the epic decasyllable.
Building on recent work in MaxEnt metrics (Hayes & Schuh 2019; Henriksson 2022), we discuss different
methods for incorporating ordinary language baselines in MaxEnt analyses of metered verse.