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Metre and clitics in Old English and Old Saxon

What it is about

The paper tries to recover prosodic information from early Germanic alliterative verse, using Old English and Old Saxon. Sievers' metrical theory, in Russom's (2022) revision, marks which syllables in a verse line are low-stress. Anderson's (2005) quadripartite clitic analysis then gives a phonological reading of these low-stress elements. The main claims are that prepositions are typically PWord enclitics, prefixes are affixal proclitics, and demonstratives move from PWord clitics to free clitics as they become definite articles. The argument is qualitative and is built on verse lines; the paper reports no numerical evaluation. A central observation is that clauses rarely begin with a preposition, as in the first line of Beowulf.

Ideas

For Mova

The relevant chapters are 11. The biblical style (verse and biblical register) and 2. Spelling, print conventions and tokens (tokens). The code is en/src/tok.rs (tokenizer) and en/src/emode.rs. The measure: the share of function words the clitic table attaches to the host the parser chooses, on modern prose and on the KJV, counted separately.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.20156

@article{goering2025metre,
  title = {{Metre and clitics in Old English and Old Saxon}},
  author = {Goering, Nelson},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.20156},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.20156}
}

References

60 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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