THE QUANTITATIVE STRUCTURE OF ESTONIAN SYLLABIC-ACCENTUAL TROCHAIC TETRAMETER
THE QUANTITATIVE STRUCTURE OF ESTONIAN SYLLABIC-ACCENTUAL TROCHAIC TETRAMETER

Summary/Abstract: The paper contains the first attempt to analyze the quantitative structure of the Estonian literary syllabic-accentual verse; it has never been posed as an issue before. The analysis comprised 20 prominent authors and more than 9000 verse lines. In order to find out which regularities are specific to poetry in general or to a particular poet, these data were compared to that of pseudotrochees extracted from prose. The performed study showed that, first, quantity plays important role as well in syllabic-accentual verse, the indices of verse being considerably different from that of pseudoverse. Second, the tendencies in quantitative structure are in good correlation with that in accentual rhythm. Third, just like in the case of accentual rhythm, the quantitative rhythm allows the clear distinction between two groups of poets, whom we conditionally call Traditionalists and Modernists.

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