Clive: Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding you. It seems to me that this boils down to a question of the realationship between theory and practice. I believe that theories are post hoc: they are efforts to formalize something that is already inherent in the situation, but because they are inevitably reductive, they can be no more than approximations. Shakespeare (and Chaucer, and the Beowulf poet) probably knew very little about prosody in formal terms, but they knew how the human voice bumps along through a sentence, especially a sung sentence, and they tried to capture those patterns. Even though the Beowulf poet was writing on what we take to be completely different prosodic principles, he (she? why not?) was still capturing a form learned from long exposure and maybe, just maybe, somehow intrinsic to human phonology and even neurology. Chaucer is writing in a form adopted from the French and imposed upon English, but as I recall the last line of the first sentence of the Prelude to the Canterbury Tales, he lapses into pretty accurate alliterative verse. It's as if the ghosts of his ancestors are whispering in his ear. Yet he makes the line fit into the iambic couplets that the French brought over.
For me the terms of prosody are a convenience, like grammatical terms, to help me explain to myself and to others what is working or not working. I simply need a vocabulary. But the bumps and thumps of speech predate the terms for them. As Frost says somewhere, they are part of cave speech, sounds from the mouth of the cave and from the cave of the mouth.
RPW
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