Holder_997_BurnsCooperRev.html
A Review of Rethinking Meter: A New Approach to the Verse Line by
Alan Holder Among the book's chief points of interest:
The first two chapters, "In the Muddled Kingdom of Meter" and "A Further
Look at the Foot," discuss what one might call the Tradition in English
prosody. Holder brings up many of the classic 19th and 20th century works
on meter, including Saintsbury, Omond, Stewart, Wimsatt and Beardsley,
Brooks and Warren, and others, and more recent scholars and critics who
retain some allegiance to these traditional approaches. He also reviews
some of the scholarship on pre-19th century metrical theorizing, and presents
a persuasive case that the foot-substitution model's claim to being the
only Tradition that early English poets were following is by no means as
solid as some critics have supposed. In fact, he points out that the foot
model has difficulties even for Classical poetry, which is presumably the
source from which English adopted it. Here and in chapter six he argues
that "phrasalism," the model he advocates, has equally deep historical
roots, going back to Anglo-Saxon half-lines, virgules in Chaucer manuscripts,
and some (though not all) Renaissance commentaries on poetics. He tries
to show where the foot-substitution model goes wrong, partly by pointing
out questionable scansions produced by scholars who use that model.
"Foot-substitution" here is my term, not Holder's. By it I mean
the idea that verse forms are best described as a sequence of a certain
number of a certain type of feet, and that any variation from that form
is best described as the substitution of a different type of foot; for
example, the iambic pentameter is a sequence of five "iambs," and a line
like King Lear's "Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life" is an iambic
pentameter with a trochee substituted for the first iamb (assuming that
"Why," "dog," "horse," "rat," and "life" are the stressed words). Holder
actually refers to this model just as "the foot," or even as simply "meter,"
but I avoid this usage because both "foot" and "meter" mean something rather
different in linguistics, and I believe the alternative usages are easier
to defend.
Throughout the literature review, Holder criticizes models which he
considers overly abstract or overly complex, and argues stridently against
some traditional prosodic notions such as "the Platonic ideal of the iambic
line," "tension" or "counterpoint," "isochrony," and "meter as expectation".
He also rejects the idea that all metrical variations should be considered
"expressive" commentaries on the meaning of the poem.
Chapter three, "Recent Prosodic Commentary," is a critique of the work
of more recent metrists, including Derek Attridge, Frederick Turner and
Ernst Pöppel, Susanne Woods, various authors from the collection Phonetics
and Phonology 1: Rhythm and Meter (ed. Youmans and Kiparsky), Richard
Cureton, and, at greater length, George T. Wright. The critique is along
similar lines to the earlier chapters: Holder praises these authors where
he agrees with them, but criticizes them wherever they incorporate the
concept of feet, or where he feels they are excessively abstract, or give
scansions that do not match "natural" (that is, prose) stress patterns,
or offer explications of meaning that he finds implausible.
Chapter four, "The Haunting of Free Verse," focuses on the idea, advanced
by several critics, that ostensibly unmetered verse has a kind of "ghost
meter" lurking behind it, and that the best way to understand free verse
rhythm is to find these covert meters. Holder links this idea to the equating
of meter with foot-substitution. He presents some examples of critics "discovering"
particular kinds of feet in apparently "free" verse. Some of these scansions
are more plausible than others, but Holder's argument is that the whole
approach is misguided. Instead, he wants to insist on an approach that
analyzes poems into phrases, rather than feet, as their primary rhythmic
units. He also argues against the practice of ignoring line divisions in
putting together sequences of feet, so that the critic is actually scanning
lines created by that critic rather than by the poet. Finally, he reiterates
his healthy skepticism about claims that poetic rhythms are closely tied
to body functions such as heartbeats or neural pulses.
In Chapter five, "Preliminaries to Revision," Holder sets out his position
on what he rightly calls "basic questions" about the pronunciation and
organization of poems. He insists again that the words of a poem should
be pronounced with only the stress they would receive in ordinary
speech. Thus he is against "promoting" or "demoting" syllables because
of their position in the line. He argues that the line is the primary
unit of organization of poetry (both in sound and in sense), and that line
integrity must be respected; that respect includes putting a pause
at the end of every line. The importance of the line and of the line-end
pause applies to both metrical and free verse. He briefly addresses the
issue of how a poem's lineation affects the speed with which it is read.
More importantly, he discusses the interaction of lineation with syntax,
and how enjambment relates to line integrity and to phrasing. Finally,
he discusses the nature of phrasing, and in particular the relationship
of syntactic phrasing to phonological phrasing (which he sees as essentially
identical).
Chapter six, "Phrasalism," is really the philosophical heart of the book.
In it, Holder develops his thesis that phrases and lines (which sometimes
amount to the same thing) are the most important organizational and rhythmic
units in poetry, and he gives examples of possible applications of this
theory to actual poems, usually comparing a non-phrasalist analysis by
some other critic to a phrasalist analysis of his own. He begins with a
long section informally defining what he means by "phrase." Though he does
not deal with the issue explicitly, it becomes clear that he does not believe
in multiple levels of phrasing, but equates "phrase" with what some linguists
would call a "pause-phrase" (that is, a group of words bounded at both
ends by silence)(1) and sees this as coterminous
with the syntactic phrase (which he also sees as essentially one-dimensional),
the intonational phrase, and the "sense-unit."
He reviews a number of other authors who could be regarded as "phrasalists,"
especially Charles L. Stevenson, Roger Mitchell, and Richard Cureton, but
he again spends the most time of all on George Wright, who apparently coined
the term "phrasalist" but is very much a traditionalist. Holder's criticisms
primarily take three forms: 1) instances of these authors dividing phrases
in ways he disagrees with; 2) instances of these authors scanning stress
patterns in ways he disagrees with; or 3) authors either failing to provide
explications of "expressive effects" of phrasing and stress or providing
explications which Holder finds unconvincing. Finally, in the section on
Wright's book Shakespeare's Metrical Art, Holder offers what he
calls "a reformulation" of the iambic pentameter, in which he does not
refer to the notions of the foot or the iamb. For that reason he suggests
that it should really be called "decasyllabic verse". (This reformulation
will be detailed below.) He proceeds to offer his own readings of poems
discussed by these authors: Shakespeare's Sonnet 116, Pound's "In a Station
of the Metro," and Plath's "Ariel."
Chapter seven, "Tuning In: Making a Place for Intonation in Prosodic
Analysis," argues that intonation has been an unjustly neglected aspect
of poetic prosody, and offers examples of ways it could be incorporated
into prosodic criticism. The chapter begins by discussing, at some length,
just what intonation is and how it works in non-poetic language: its relation
to stress, accent, and phrasing, and its semantic and pragmatic functions.
He argues that intonation patterns, while variable, are not indeterminate
or impossibly complex, and that they can be inferred from written poems.
Holder also reviews some of the literature on poetic intonation, but finds
it sparse and inadequate. Though he mentions several linguists who have
worked on intonation, he focuses on just two, David Crystal and Dwight
Bolinger, and settles on Bolinger's system of notation and, by and large,
on Bolinger's claims about the functions of intonational contours. It is
these that he incorporates in the later part of the chapter in offering
his own intonational analyses of poetic lines. He brings in some new examples,
but mostly uses the same ones from chapter six and before (Shakespeare,
Pound, Stevens, Plath), which allows a helpful comparison of approaches.
The Epilogue, "Epireading, Graphireading, and the Matter of Voicing,"
is a brief attempt to relate the previous chapters to a large issue in
recent literary theory and philosophy, the nature of the text. Holder discusses
the difference between "epireading," which sees writing as a record of
past speech, and "graphireading," which takes the written text as a thing
in itself rather than the transcription of a vocal/auditory event. This
issue inevitably evokes the names of Jacques Derrida and other postmodernists,
and much of Holder's discussion centers on their ideas, but it is worth
pointing out (as Holder does) that the question is much older than that;
the chapter mentions traditional Christian theology and Greek philosophy,
and in more recent times, Mallarme, Wellek and Warren, and Kenneth Burke,
among others. Holder reviews the debate and comes down firmly on the side
of epireading. Interestingly, he argues not that epireading is the way
reading is always done, but that it is the most rewarding way to readbecause
all the effects of sound patterning that he has been discussing can only
be perceived if we experience writing as speech: "Everything I have said
in this book is predicated on the assumption that, ideally at least, a
poem is to be voiced, not subliminally, but out loud...."
This book reviews a lot of scholarship, some of it in depth and some
only in passing. Though the breadth of Holder's research is impressive,
the coherence of the book might have been improved if he included only
those sources he considered most relevant and important. Many seem to be
included only to show their inadequacy. I happen to have read the great
majority of these sources at one time or another, yet I still sometimes
had trouble following what Holder was saying that another author claimed,
which made it difficult to evaluate Holder's opinion of these claims. This
problem is at least partly due to his summarizing many complex ideas in
a very abridged form.
Holder is highly opinionated, and that accounts for some of the pleasure
the book can give (for example in his witty put-downs of "foot-fetishists,"
"metrical good old boys," "prosodic inquisitors," "the curious sport of
foot-spotting," etc.). However, this aggressive attitude can also become
abrasive, especially when he occasionally combines it with a nominalized,
pedantic style: "There is, in fact, a domination of the pages on prosody
by the application of that system of scansion" (22); "While allowing for
rhetorical overkill in the remarks of John Nist that I quoted at the start
of my introduction, one can only applaud his attributing a stultifying
certainty and rigidity to traditional metrics and their pedagogic perpetuation"
(23).
There are not an unusual number of editing errors, but a couple may
cause real problems for readers who wish to pursue the subject further.
Robert Hass (recently poet laureate of the United States) is consistently
referred to as Robert Haas. Also, there is a typographical error in a scansion
of a line by Walt Whitman, quoted from Richard Cureton (on p. 169), that
makes both Cureton's commentary and Holder's discussion of that commentary
almost impossible to follow, until we figure out, purely by inference,
what the scansion is actually supposed to be.
One more production problem is probably not Holder's fault, but still
makes the book less enlightening than it might otherwise be: that is the
slow pace of academic publishing and distribution. The book is copyrighted
in 1995, but clearly most of it was written long before that date. A good
example of the difficulties this causes is in Holder's criticism of Richard
Cureton's work. He finds inconsistencies among Cureton's articles and finds
at least one of them too dense and "compressed" to follow easily. He remarks
in an endnote that Cureton refers to "the impending publication of a long
manuscript. . ." that might make some of these things clearer, but "as
of the time of my [Holder's] writing this, such publication has not yet
occurred" (257). The manuscript in question was surely Cureton's Rhythmic
Phrasing in English Verse, which was published in 1992. It is too bad
that Holder did not have it available, as this book is surely one of the
most systematic and rigorously theoretical accounts of meter and rhythm
that has been written. Undoubtedly, Holder would still find much to disagree
with in Cureton's book, but at least he would be criticizing a unified
and contextualized account. This is especially unfortunate as one would
expect Holder and Cureton, both extremely interested in phrasing, to be
natural alliesyet Holder is actually more respectful of "traditionalists"
like Wright and Roger Mitchell.
Feet and stress
As I mentioned above, a large part of the book is devoted to a dissection
of traditional metrical theory, in the hopes of replacing it with something
more suitable. Holder makes his point successfully, but presses it too
far.
One reason he doesn't like the foot is that it is arbitrary: foot boundaries,
at least as they have traditionally been applied, do not correspond to
any intuitive division of language into units of sound or sense. I have
long agreed with Holder's argument here, especially after trying to teach
traditional prosody to an undergraduate class. Many students have trouble
deciding where to divide one foot from another; some seem to give up and
do it almost at random. They do this not because they are insensitive to
something that is "there" in the text, but because, unlike experienced
prosodists, they do not bring preconceived categories with them and insert
those categories into the text. For example, take this line from Wordsworth's
The Prelude: "Make rigourous inquisition, the report" (l. 148).
Other than to make it fit the paradigm of iambic pentameter, would we have
any reason to divide it into these units: "Make ri |gourous in | quisi
| tion, the | report"? The divisions cut across word boundaries, phrase
boundaries, punctuation, sense unitsalmost any other grouping of language
one can think of. Is "gourous in" even a linguistic entity? Or "tion, the"?
Yet this criticism is fair only if we acknowledge that the more intelligent
proponents of foot-substitution never claim that feet are the same type
of entity as words or phrases. No prosodist I know of has claimed that
we pause after each foot. If we try to make the paradigm work as well as
possible, we have to make the foot a separate dimension of measurement.
The traditional foot, insofar as it makes sense at all, only makes sense
as part of a sequence of feet, as a way of describing the length
and general stress pattern of a line. Perhaps an analogy will help: The
front wall of my log house is 14 feet high. I would argue that the preceding
statement is a meaningful one. Yet no "foot" of those 14 really stands
out as discrete from the others. Each log is an entity that would have
some existence if the wall were dismantled, but each foot is not. Yet the
foot measurement is still useful as an abstraction, because actual logs
are irregular in thickness. To say a wall is "14 logs high" is precise
in one way but imprecise in another, just as it is to say a line is "two
phrases long".
Advocates of the traditional foot generally do acknowledge that word-boundaries,
phrase-boundaries, and even pauses are part of our experience of a poem,
though different writers give that experience different amounts of weight.
The venerable concept of the "caesura" is one acknowledgement of phrasing.
But a pure traditionalist would not consider that phrasing to be part of
the meter; instead, he would consider it a separate level of structure
that interacts with the meter. Holder does offer a couple of examples of
well-known prosodists apparently dismissing the importance of phrasing,
but more of his examples seem to be arguing merely that phrasing and meter
are not the same thing, as in C.S. Lewis' "[A pause] is a rhetorical and
syntactical fact, not a metrical fact" (cited in Holder, 150).
Despite my reservations on this point, much of this part of the review
is insightful; Holder can adduce respected authorities for each opinion
he offers, and he is adept at pointing out contradictions and gaps in the
arguments and wording of those he disagrees with. He is at his best when
he presents and discusses other authors' actual analyses of poems; as Holder
says early on, "By their scansions shall ye know them." Some of these scansions
seem very implausible indeed, which is usually Holder's point. On the other
hand, he is at his worst when he seems to be more eager to find weaknesses
than he is to give authors credit for what they do handle well.
Linguistic Lapses
Holder presents himself as a literary scholar, not a linguist. That
being the case, he has done a pretty good job of educating himself on the
linguistic theories most relevant to his arguments. However, his reading
in linguistics seems to be heavily dependent on what is listed in T.V.F.
Brogan's bibliography, English Versification, 1570-1980. This is,
of course, the definitive work of its kind, so he is wise to start with
itbut there is an awful lot of linguistic work from the '90s, '80s and
even the late '70s that it does not include. What's more, even where Holder
does cite the relevant texts, he sometimes does not really integrate what
they say into his own views.
For example, the model of the foot Holder attacks, an arbitrary unit
that crosses morpheme boundaries, word boundaries, and phrase boundaries
with impunity, and has anywhere from zero to two or more stressed syllables,
does seem to be motivated only by the need to have names for different
verse-forms. However, many theoristsmainly linguistshave tried to redefine
the foot as a unit that is closely tied to the morphology (internal
structure) of words and the syntax of small phrases. The theory of metrical
phonology has become well-established in the last two decades, and is supported
by evidence not only from English but from various other languages. Holder
never really examines whether a foot defined in a less arbitrary way could
have a place in his theory.
Metrical phonology could also be brought to bear on another of Holder's
pet peeves: promotion and demotion. In arguing for "natural stress," Holder
(quite rightly) argues that prosodists should not violate the phonological
integrity of words and phrases by changing their pronunciation just to
make them fit the prosodists' ideas of meter. He assumes that this
is what we are doing any time we take a word that in another context might
be unstressed and mark it as stressed, or vice versa. For him, only the
dictionary-sanctioned stress on any word is "natural." What's more, he
usually only recognizes one lexical stress; he doesn't seem to believe
in secondary stress. In fact, he doesn't seem to believe that stress is
relative; he sees it as binary, either yes or no.
But metrical phonologists have made it clear that in actual speech stress
is context sensitive, and though much of the context that matters is semantic,
the rhythmic context is also relevant. The famous "English rhythm rule"
is one example of this principle in effect: in a phrase like "Mississippi
legislators" or "Tennessee legislators," the primary stress is likely to
be moved to the first syllable of each state name in order to make the
phrase more regular in rhythm, even though the dictionary pronuciation
would put primary stress on the third syllable of both "Mississippi" and
"Tennessee." Because the first syllable of "legislators" is stressed, the
stress in the preceding word moves away from it. Furthermore, in the first
example, both "-sip-" and "-lat-" will receive secondary stress, that is
they will be stronger than the syllables immediately adjacent to them,
but not as strong as the primary stress in each word. This has the effect
of creating a still more regular alternation: STRONG-weak-strong-weak-STRONG-weak-strong-weak.
Not only English, but many unrelated languages allow manipulation of
stress to create more regular metrical patterns; Yup'ik Eskimo, for example,
has a rhythmic stress rule that tends to put stress on alternating syllables.
Most, if not all, theorists of metrical phonology have some provision for
this kind of promotion and demotionincluding Elisabeth Selkirk,(2)
whose views on phrasing and pausing Holder relies on heavily. We could
speculate that in metrical poetry this rhythmic effect might be even more
pronounced than in ordinary speech. But he seems not to have taken in this
aspect of metrical phonologyprobably because it contradicts a view of
stress that he doesn't want to give up.
One could argue, of course, that demotion or promotion of this sort
is an aspect of performance, not an inherent part of the text. It
is true that stress shift and promotion/demotion rules are typically optional.
Yet this argument is not available to Holder, because he repeatedly insists
that it is the performance, whether silent or (preferably) aloud, that
is the proper object of study, the written text being merely a script for
performance.
He does add a hedge at one point; on p. 129 he asserts that "the words
of a poem should be read in such a manner as to receive their lexical stress,
or only such modification of that stress as is required by the rules of
English phonology." This is the first and only real acknowledgement that
stress can be modified by phonological context. Unfortunately, he seldom
integrates this insight into his scansions.
There are several other places where Holder's lack of familiarity with
contemporary linguistics creates problems. For example, when he criticizes
traditional prosodists for ignoring phrasing in favor of foot-divisions
he merely overstates what is basically a valid pointbut he also entirely
ignores phonologists like Bruce Hayes and Paul Kiparsky, who depend heavily
on phrase boundaries and pauses in their formulation of rules for what
counts as "metrical" in the verse of Shakespeare and other poets. I believe
their accounts are weak in other ways, but they certainly cannot be accused
of ignoring phrasingeven though they also hang on to the concepts of
the foot and of metrical positions in the line, both of which Holder would
like to throw out.
Phrasing
Holder's limited sophistication in linguistics, paired with his resistance
to multi-level theories, again handicaps him in his discussion of phrasing.
He wants there to be one entity known as "the phrase," and for it to make
identical divisions in terms of syntax, semantics, pause, and intonation.
That is, for him a syntactic phrase will also be exactly one "sense-unit,"
pause-phrase, and intonational phrase. He does not acknowledge other types
of phrasing, such as the "clitic phrase," at all. This point of view seems
to be based mainly on his intuition rather than any empirical data. In
my experience with recorded speech, these different types of phrasing tend
to be congruent or coterminous with each other, but quite often do not
match up. Other linguists who work extensively with real-life speech data
have come to the same conclusion; Woodbury (1987), for example, outlines
a multilevel definition of phrasing, with possible mismatches at every
level, that I have found quite useful.
When confronted with evidence that different types of phrase are not
necessarily congruent (for example, in cases of poetic enjambment), Holder
is inconsistent. At times he seems to acknowledge these facts and hedge
his stronger claims: ". . . we certainly have the possibility that
syntactic entities and intonational ones will coincide within a given sentence"
(207). At other times, he seems to try to rationalize the problem away.
His shaky grasp of linguistics also contributes to a confusing discussion
here. He cites Selkirk in claiming that apparent instances of syntactic
and intonational units not being congruent are caused by a "Transformational
Grammar" notion of the sentence.(3) The
example he uses, taken from Selkirk, who takes it from elsewhere, is "This
is the cat that chased the rat that ate the cheese." Here is his discussion:
There are better examples Holder could have used to illustrate this
point, especially if we look at examples of spontaneous speech instead
of made-up textbook sentences. There are also a few other places in the
book where he needlessly explains away conflicts with transformational
grammar that are not really conflictsfor example, when he says that despite
what the grammars say, he will include clauses in the category of phrasesapparently
unaware that many contemporary grammars don't really distinguish between
clauses and phrases in any way that would affect his theory (though they
sometimes use substitute names that cover both, such as "projection").
Expectation and iambic pentameter
A large part of the book is devoted to discussions of the English iambic
pentameter. Holder, since he does not believe in feet at all, does not
consider the word "iambic" to be very useful in describing this verse form.
He is also skeptical of critics who dwell overly much on reader's "expectations"
that a line will match the iambic pentameter model. This skepticism encompasses
not only the widely-discussed concept of "expectation" (also known as "metrical
set") but also the familiar idea that readers compare each actual line
to a "Platonic ideal" line as they read, and that the difference between
the actual and the ideal produces "counterpoint" or "tension."
There seem to be two main reasons that Holder doesn't agree with these
ideas. One is that he finds the notion of a "Platonic ideal" too complex;
how, he implicitly asks, could a reader be hearing two metrical patterns
at once? The second reason is that he feels that the stress patterns of
poetry in this tradition vary too widely for "iambic" to be a very accurate
description.
Much of the argument here seems to center on differing interpretation
of the key terms. For example, when theorists use the term "ideal" to describe
an absolutely regular iambic line, Holder seems to interpret it as meaning
"maximally desirable". Yet, as Holder acknowledges, most critics do not
see perfect regularity as desirable; they prefer some variation. He quotes
Mark Liddell, "There must be something wrong with an aesthetic system whose
norms exist only to be violated" (57). But if we take "ideal" in the sense
of "the guiding idea," the conflict is diminished if not resolved altogether.
If we followed Liddell's logic in all the arts, we would have to say that
photorealism is the supreme form of painting, but that photographs are
superior to any painting; that death-masks are superior to sculpture; and
that tonal music should be without syncopation or dissonancesince in
each case there is a background pattern that the artist "fails" to match
exactly.
Perhaps "framework" would be a less loaded term than "ideal" here. Or
the terms "marked case" and unmarked case," though they may smack of linguistic
jargon, would be really useful for this discussion.(4)
Similarly, the word "expectation" can be taken in a general or a specific
way. A number of critics have argued that part of the effect of a known
form like the iambic pentameter derives from the reader expecting a certain
pattern, and having that expectation satisfied or frustrated. Holder, in
opposing this view, cites a number of estimates showing that allegedly
"iambic" poetry has a large proportion of lines that are not composed of
all iambs. How, he asks, can readers be led to "expect" iambic lines if
the lines they have already read are so inconsistent? But of course we
do not expect perfect regularity. All that is necessary to produce an expectation
is that we recognize a recurring patternwe start to look for its next
occurrence. Since in the estimates Holder cites, between 40% and 75% of
all lines in "iambic" poetry are perfectly regular (or at least
have five full stresses), and we can assume that many of the remainder
are imperfectly but primarily iambic, it seems to me it would take a pretty
oblivious reader not to notice this pattern and start looking for it.
Holder's redefinition of the iambic pentameter, which he renames "decasyllabic
verse," tacitly acknowledges these facts. Here is my summary of it (summarized
from pp. 174-5):
"By their scansions shall ye know them"
As I mentioned earlier, one of Holder's frequent rhetorical strategies
is to show a scansion and/or interpretation by another critic, then to
criticize it and, sometimes to offer his own alternative analysis. This
strategy can be persuasive, and certainly makes the book more interesting
to read. However, it also invites us to examine both versions for ourselves,
and when we do, we find that some of Holder's own analyses are just as
forced as the ones he criticizes. I found far more nitpicky examples than
anyone would want to read in this review, but I will offer a few of the
most telling.
For one example, after having picked apart Wright's scansion of Shakespeare's
Sonnet 116, Holder offers his own. But if Wright is guilty of "distorting"
natural stress patterns to make it fit the meter, Holder may be guilty
of doing the same thing to avoid looking metrical. Here are his
scansions of three (nonconsecutive) lines:
He goes on to base an interpretive claim on this odd scansion: "the
hitch in line 3 might be said to register a sense of psychological disturbance
on the part of the 'love'. . . ." The psychological disturbance may be
there (though the lines seem to me much more an expression of conventional
wisdom than of strong emotion), but object-verb inversion is so common
in Renaissance poetry that the claim seems weak. It's just not true that
inverted syntax always signals psychological disturbance. Also, we should
remember why inversions are so common: overwhelmingly, they operate
to make the meter more regular (assuming we believe in meter) or to get
a rhyme to the end of a line.
Another example of a problem scansion comes from the chapter on "The
Haunting of Free Verse" (111-112). Holder is rebutting a claim by Paul
Fussell about Walt Whitman's poem "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer."
Fussell points out that the last line, "looked up in perfect silence at
the stars," is regularly iambic and says that it reveals "the ghost meter
which the poem has been concealing all along." Holder does not question
Fussell's scansion of the last line, but comments sarcastically: "I might
note that the poem's third line'When I was shown the charts and diagrams,
to add, divide, and measure them'with its eighteen syllables and, by
my count, seven or eight stresses, does a supremely successful job of such
concealment."
However, this line can be used against Holder's position as easily as
for it. If you allow secondary stress and metrical promotions of weaker
syllables, you get a pretty regular line:
On the other hand, I can't see how Holder could get his count of "seven
or eight stresses" without violating his own principles. The only automatic,
primary lexical stresses are on "shown," "charts," "di-," "add," "-vide,"
and "mea-." This only adds up to six. Holder must be implicitly allowing
himself at least to recognize a secondary stress (to make 7), and also
to promote a weak syllable (to make 8)even though he accuses other critics
of "distorting" the natural pattern when they do the same thing. And if
he does allow eight stresses, assuming they are the ones I have identified,
then the line would strike me as overwhelmingly iambic.
Another possible approach to this line would avoid promotion and demotion,
but Holder apparently does not sanction this approach either. That would
be simply to discount as "extrametrical" any extra unstressed syllables
at the beginning and end of the line, making them "anacrusis," and "hypercatalexis"
respectively. Holder never mentions these possibilities, so I assume he
disagrees with them. In fact, he does not even appear to believe in the
traditional "feminine ending." From one point of view these devices do
seem like a way of fudging a line to make it seem more metrical than it
is; however, phoneticians have found these concepts (especially anacrusis)
useful even for speech that is not poetry. Speakers do measurably give
less time and weight to such syllables, which might be an argument for
excluding them from the main rhythmic description. Allowing anacrusis would
make the two halves of the Whitman line symmetrical except for extra unstressed
syllables begining the first half: (?)/x/x/xx, (?)/x/x/xx (where "(?)"
stands for any number of unstressed syllables after a pause).
To sum up this topic: Holder writes, "What we want is scansion without
presupposition" (127). I am not convinced that this is possible. We inevitably
bring one set of presuppositions or another with us.
"Expressive" possibilities
Along with citing dubious and not-so-dubious scansions by other critics,
Holder also frequently criticizes literary interpretations based on these
scansions, especially those based on the idea of "expressive variation."
However, as his principles for "decasyllabic verse" above show, he is not
opposed to this type of interpretation as a wholein fact he is dismissive
of theorists who deal only with form and do not offer a way to connect
form to meaning. I agree with him that such links, when they are persuasive,
can be very interesting and even enlightening. At the same time I must
say that my own experience, both in reading and in writing prosodic commentaries,
is that the attempt to link rhythmic or metrical form to meaning is fraught
with the danger of arbitrary claims and self-fulfilling prophecies. The
targets of Holder's criticism often fall prey to these tendencies, but
unfortunately he himself does too, at times. As examples, let me take one
interpretation based on stress and one based on phrasing; I will offer
one based on intonation later.
In the first example, Holder criticizes Annie Finch's claims about traditional
metrical feet in these lines from Whitman: "No poem proud, I chanting bring
to thee, nor mastery's rapturous verse/ But a cluster containing night's
darkness and blood-dripping wounds...". Finch calls the beginning of the
first line "an embedded iambic pentameter," and says, "The triple feet
in the second part of the [first] line reject the 'rapturous' dactylic
rhythm as well, but only to pick it up at even greater length in the second
line, which evokes the vagueness, darkness and mysterious power typical
in Whitman's dactylic lines."
Holder sarcastically comments, "After the alleged 'iambic pentameter'
in the opening of the first line, all of two "triple feet," that is, dactyls,
presumably manage, at one and the same time, to establish a rapturous rhythm
and to reject it." He also questions Finch's dactylic reading of the second
line: "If there is a rapturous dactylic rhythm intended here, Whitman has
botched the job." Instead, Whitman "uses his free verse in the second line
to dramatize the notion of a 'cluster' by clustering stresses, as follows":
The second line brings up a more subtle, but even more important point.
Holder correctly points out that in order to read it as a series of dactyls
(or, better, anapests) we must subordinate the stress of "night's" and
"drip-", both of which are likely to be stressed; he argues that this is
an arbitrary distortion just to get the meter to work. But I would call
it a simplification rather than a distortion. Phrasal stress and compound
stress work differently: a head noun, such as "darkness," normally receives
stronger stress than a possessive preceding it, while the first element
of a compound like "blood-dripping" receives stronger stress than the second
element. Thus both Finch and Holder simplify the line for their own purposes:
Finch's scansion ignores the difference between weakly stressed syllables
and unstressed ones, while Holder's ignores the difference between weaker
and stronger stresses. And both attach imaginable but unconvincing meanings
to those scansions.
An example of interpretation based on phrasing comes in Holder's critique
of Roger Mitchell's explication of these lines from Alexander Pope's "Second
Pastoral":
Phrasing and phrasalism
I have already discussed some issues in Holder's apprach to phrasing;
some of these are rather technical and theoretical. Another aspect of phrasing
which is of great importance but not at all hard to grasp is the relation
of the phrase to the line. The basic question is this: is the end of a
line automatically also the end of a phrase? There is simply no widespread
consensus on this, among poets, critics, or prosodists. Some people reading
poetry aloud consistently pause, others don't. However, Holder solves the
problem by fiat: "[although] I generally hold that prescriptive statements
are best resisted in thinking about prosody, I have to. . . insist that
a pause be registered at the end of the line and that it be actual, however
slight" (148).
This seems like the Gordian knot solution, but in fact it is probably
the best one from Holder's point of view. It frees him to go on and discuss
other aspects of the importance of lineation, which he rightly says is
a crucial, even definitive, aspect of verse structure (especially in free
verse). Holder is not one to let a false loyalty to descriptivism prevent
him from making strong statements.
Intonation
The book's final chapter, on intonation (pitch patterns) in poetry is
its most original and most important contribution. As Holder points out,
the subject has historically been underrepresented in prosodic theory and
criticism. There are at least two reasons for this scarcity. First, English
intonation has historically not been well understood by linguists (or anyone
else), and linguists still have major disagreements both on how it should
be represented and on how it functions in the language. Second, intonation
is a feature of speech but not of writing, and as long as prosodists focus
on written texts rather than performances, it is very hard to say what
the intonation of a given poem is. The same poem could be performed
with a number of different intonational melodies, depending on interpretation,
context, and personal style. Holder acknowledges both of these problems,
but argues that they are not insurmountable and proceeds to give some examples
of intonational criticism of specific poems. Though I do not agree with
all of his readings, they are important as models: he is lucid both about
what he thinks the intonational patterns are and about how they can be
used in explication.
As Holder argues, intonation is an important part of poetic language,
and the fact that it is tricky to deal with does not justify ignoring it.
It is important for several reasons. Holder focuses on its pragmatic and
interactive properties: "Intonation is inseparable from. . . [the] speaker's
attitude toward his or her subject matter and/or toward the audience;"
it can also "mark focus or emphasis." He points out that attitude, in the
form of "tone," is a standard literary critical issuebut is usually not
discussed in terms of intonation. There are other intriguing aspects to
intonation, as well: Bolinger notes that up and down pitch is often tied
to up and down metaphors; Selkirk notes that English is unusually rich
in the variety of its pitch accents, and therefore at least potentially
has rich expressive possibilities (having many possible melodies may lead
to many possible meanings).
The theory of intonation that Holder adopts for this purpose is taken
more or less entire from Bolinger, Intonation and its Parts. This
is not a bad choice, for reasons I'll outline in a moment. However, it
is a less inevitable choice than Holder makes it seem. In his survey of
the field, he again relies too heavily on Brogan's bibliography. He writes
that intonation has been neglected in linguistics as a whole, just as it
has in poetic prosody. The only intonation scholars he discusses in any
detail at all are Bolinger and Crystal, and the emphasis is heavily on
Bolinger. One gets the impression that these two are lone wolves, bucking
the intellectual currents of the time. Certainly they are both respected
authorities, and perhaps they were once lonelier than they now seem. However,
there has been a virtual explosion of work on intonation in the last twenty
years, spurred on partly by the improvements in computerized acoustical
analysis and partly by input from the study of intonation in tone
langaugesjust as a previous wave of research was prompted a couple of
generations earlier by structural linguistic methods and by improvements
in analog devices such as the sound spectrograph. Scholars like Mark Liberman,
William Leben, Janet Pierrehumbert, Mary Beckman, Gail Ayres, Julia Hirschberg,
Gregory Ward, Alan Cruttenden, Johan 't Hart, Rene Collier, David Brazil,
Gillian Brown, Dafydd Gibbon, M.A.K. Halliday, and many others (I hope
no one will take offense at having been left out) have been producing useful
work in this field. Holder seems largely unaware of these developments.
Despite this lapse, though, Bolinger's notation and theory is a good
choice for a book like this one, because it is, at least on the surface,
simple, and it does not require much expert knowledge to understand his
graphics and his claims. Intonational contours are represented with ordinary
typeface, arranged on the page to show its "highness" or "lowness". The
infinite variety of possible melodies is reduced to three basic pitch "profiles,"
labelled "A," "B," and "C." This apparent simplicity can be deceptive in
some ways, but certainly presents a more inviting face to the non-specialist
reader than most competing systems.
If Holder's solution to the problem of disagreements among linguists
is simply to pick a linguist and stay with him, his solution to the other
problem I mentionedthe fact that written texts do not specify any particular
intonationis similarly straightforward. On the one hand, he argues that
intonation is not really as indeterminate as has sometimes been claimed.
(He has a point, but again overstates the case; there's more individual
and dialectal variation than he acknowledges.) On the other hand, his practical,
rather than theoretical, solution is simply to use his own intuitive judgements
of what the intonational pattern for a given passage should be. He does
not provide a set of rules for translating lines into melodies; nor does
he rely on experimental data; instead, he provides a melody and asserts
it is the right one, or at least a right one. In effect, he is analyzing
a performancehis ownrather than a text. This is entirely consistent
with what he has said earlier in defense of performance.
Having set up a method, Holder goes on to present some intonation patterns
in poetic pasages; he argues that these patterns add an element that metrical
or semantic analysis would miss. Some of them are quite interesting. For
example, he discusses King Lear's speech after Cordelia's death: "Why should
a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,/ And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come
no more,/ Never, never, never, never, never" (V, iii, 306-8). Holder notes
that it has been pointed out before that the last of these lines "acquires
its force in part by reversing the iambic norm, giving us a series of five
'trochees'." But he finds it more striking that the line is also "a series
of five A profiles," which in Bolinger's notation would be:
Holder is mainly interested in making semantic contrasts or parallels
like this one; he does not make much of an argument for paying attention
to intonation patterns purely for the pleasure of their sonic structure.
I believe this aspect deserves more attention.(5)
Still, he does find many more interesting examples like the one above,
and this is an important contribution.
On the other hand, there are some serious drawbacks to Holder's method.
For one thing, these intonation patterns seem to be based mostly or entirely
on introspection, not on listening to actual performances produced for
other purposes. Holder generally has a sensitive ear for intonation, but
he produces several readings that I find extremely dubious. Second, the
emphasis on intonational meanings instead of melodies again produces some
of the forced links we saw in his interpretations of meter and phrasing.
Finally, there are really more than three possible types of contour, as
both Bolinger and Holder ultimately have to tacitly admit. This over-simplicity
makes us label patterns that are meaningfully different as the same profile,
and at the same time allows enough ambiguity that the same contour can
be labelled two or more different ways.
Some context is generally necessary to judge a reading of intonation,
and so I will have to limit the number and complexity of the examples that
follow. I hope that one example of each type will give the general idea.
An example of the first type, implausible intonation, is again from
Shakespeare's Sonnet 116: "O no, it is an ever-fixed mark." Holder calls
the first phrase a "B profile" (rising), or actually an exaggerated example
of it (in Crystal's terms, a "high booster")(222):
Another example of a shaky interpretation comes from the same poem,
in the phrase "Love's not Time's fool." Holder calls this a B+A (rising-falling)
contour:
Finally, the labelling problem. Of course if two readers disagree about
the actual pitches of a line they are also likely to disagree about which
pitch "profiles" it contains, but it also happens that we can agree on
the pitch and yet disagree on the labelling. This is one of the basic problems
of intonational analysis: pitch comes to us in a nearly continuous and
infinitely variable stream; how do we sort it into similar and dissimilar
units? An example comes from Robert Frost's "Acquainted with the Night."
Many of these problems are inherent in the subject, but they could be
lessened. For one thing, tapes are available of actors or the poets themselves
reading all of these poems. If the investigator and the performer were
two different people, a lot of circularity could be avoided. With live
readers, experimentation would even be possible. Second, though we must
resist the temptation to trust our tools instead of our minds, the technology
to analyze pitch electronically is now very sophisticated. It would be
a good idea for anyone entering the field of intonation at least to look
at some actual F0 graphs to get an idea of the physical (as opposed to
psychological) reality of pitch in speech. Computers also offer possibilities
for testing impressions and even for synthesizing experiments. Some experience
of this sort could help avoid producing unlikely contours.
Conclusion
Rethinking Meter is flawed in several ways. These flaws, however,
are not so serious as to negate the value of the book. Anyone looking for
a critical review of the literature on meter, or for examples of how criticism
based on phrasing and intonation can work, would do well to take a look
at it.
Bibliography
Bolinger, Dwight. Intonation and its Parts:Melody in Spoken English.
Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1986.
Brogan, T.V.F. English Versification, 1570-1980: A Reference Guide
with a Global Appendix. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981.
Kiparsky, Paul, and Gilbert Youmans, eds. Phonetics and Phonology,
Vol. 1. Rhythm and Meter. San Diego: Academic P, 1989.
Selkirk, Elisabeth O. Phonology and Syntax: The Relation Between
Sound and
Structure. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1984.
Woodbury, Anthony. "Rhetorical Structure in a Central Alaskan Yup'ik
Eskimo
Traditional Narrative." 1. Holder gives his approval to this quote from Mitchell:
"The most reliable way of identifying groups [i.e. phrases] is through
the pauses which sensible reading forces upon us."
2. See, for example, her "Principle of Rhythmic Alternation"
and her rules for "demibeat addition."
3. He really means a "Phrase Structure" notion; a
representation of internal sentence structure by trees or brackets. Transformations
do not enter into this argument.
4. For non-linguists: the "unmarked case" of any
phenomenon is the most basic, widely applicable, unsurprising version.
"Marked cases" are the less common or less predictable ones. Simple examples
would be lion (unmarked: all lions) vs. lioness (marked:
only adult females), or subject-verb-object word order (unmarked in English)
vs. subject-object-verb word order (marked in English: used only in special
cases).
5. Holder's reluctance to talk about sound in itself
goes along with an extended argument he is making against analogies between
music and poetry, and in particular against identifying intonation with
melody. Even though intonation is quite literally the shape of pitch in
time, Holder emphasizes the differences between intonation in speech and
melody in music (by which he clearly means tonal, classical, Western music).
Here again he greatly overstates the case. Speaking is not the same thing
as singing, but that does not mean that speech does not have melodic properties
that can be interesting (and pleasing, or displeasing). Nor is his citation
of neurological evidence convincing; the evidence in question does not
directly address the question of whether speech has melody, or whether
the brain can process musical features and linguistic features simultaneously.
G. Burns Cooper
University of Alaska, Fairbanks
Copyright © G. Burns Cooper 1997
Received: 24 September 1997; Published: 12 October 1997
KEYWORDS: meter, foot, iambic, phrase, phrasalism, intonation
.
REVIEW OF: Rethinking Meter: A New Approach to the Verse Line
by Alan Holder. 1995.
Bucknell University Press, Lewisburg (London: Associated
University Presses). pp. 298.
ISBN: 0-8387-5292-6. $42.50 hb.
I. Introduction
This book is a significant critique of metrical criticism and theory, and
offers some useful suggestions for how that criticism and theorizing should
proceed in the future. Because Versification is a new journal, it
seemed worthwhile to review this book even though the copyright date is
1995. Rethinking Meter will be worth a look for anyone interested
in English poetic prosody.
Among its chief flaws, as I see them:
A more detailed critique is given below. First, though, readers may find
it useful to have an overview of the book's contents in the order that
Holder presents them.
II. Overview
Rethinking Meter begins, as is common in books on prosody, with
a dismissal of much of what has already been written on the subject; the
first sentence of Chapter 1 reads: "Perusing the critical literature of
prosody is useful for defining the issues regarding poetry's sound patterns,
but the sad fact is that the bulk of that literature is wrong-headed or
irrelevant, forever warming up dubious pieties"(19). Despite its wrongheadedness
and irrelevancy, however, Holder devotes most of the book (the first four
chapters, plus major parts of the other three) to a review of this literature.
III. Critique
Style and editing
One of the bracketings sets off as a syntactic unit, in this case a
verb phrase, the words "chased the rat". A similar bracketing gives us
"ate the cheese." But in vocalizing the sentence one is likely to say "This
is the cat," then pause, then say "that chased the rat," then pause, then
say "that ate the cheese." Such a phonological rendering sets up
sound units that do not observe the respective boundaries of the syntactic
ph[r]ases, "chased the rat" and "ate the cheese." But there is nothing
that compels us to describe this or any other sentence in transformational
grammar terms in order to characterize its structure. A perfectly acceptable
alternative would be to see the sentence in question as composed of a main
clause, followed by two relative clauses, each of which begins with "that."
The three clauses, designated by intonation phrases, would give us a perfect
fit between intonation and syntax. (207)
What is he talking about? I know of no Transformational Grammar, or Phrase
Structure Grammar, treatment that would not analyze this sentence as a
main (or "matrix") clause with two relative clauses (though the terminology
may vary a little). The difficulty, if there is one, is that the constituents
are nested:
This is [NPthe cat [RCthat
__ [VPchased [NPthe rat [RCthat __ [VPate
[NPthe cheese]]]]]]].
That is, "the cat that chased the rat that ate the cheese" is a noun phrase,
"that chased the rat that ate the cheese" is a relative clause modifying
"cat," "chased the rat that ate the cheese" is a verb phrase within the
relative clause, and so on. The only problem with this is that "this is
the cat," and "that chased the rat" are intonation units but not whole
syntactic constituents. This is indeed a theoretical problem in the relation
of syntax to phonology, but it does not seem like a very difficult one
to solvefor example, by stating that the beginning of a clause is a possible
place for an intonational phrase boundary, without reference to the syntactic
structure of what comes before. (Selkirk resolves the problem in a slightly
different but equally uncomplicated way.)
And here is how we are to scan and analyze decasyllabic verse:
For the most part this is a sensible and accurate description. As Holder
points out, it recategorizes many common types of lines as "regular" that
would have to be considered "variants" in a more traditional definition.
However, despite renaming it "decasyllabic," he's really had to keep a
covert iambic model in here anyway: "[In decasyllabic verse] we would compare
each line's pattern of stress distribution with the metrical paradigm's
distribution norm, looking for possibly significant deviations" (175).
So there is a "distribution norm" that we hear deviations from, but somehow
that is not the same as an "ideal iambic line" that we compare actual lines
to. Holder repeatedly refers to prosodists' "penchant for having it both
ways;" he should include himself in this group.
The first of these examples is plausible, but "Let" could also easily be
stressed, which would give it the regulation five stresses instead of four.
(However, he needs the first two words to be unstressed for a later point,
when he contrasts them with "O no" in line 5.) The third example (line
8) follows Holder's rules, but misses an important point: the second syllable
of "although" is clearly stronger than the first, and also stronger than
the word that follows it. And if we mark "-though" with a stress, the line
is perfectly iambic. Finally, the middle example is the most bizarre; I
can't see any justification either for stressing the word "it" (which,
as Holder points out, is one of the most inherently unstressable words
in the language) or for putting a pause between "it" and "alteration".
Holder's long rationalization of his decision, based on the fact that the
syntax (word order) of the clause is inverted, is unconvincing. My guess
is that, consciously or unconsciously, Holder puts the stress on "it" to
avoid having a secondary stress on the first syllable of "alteration,"
which would make the line much more regular (even more so, if we also promote
"when"):
In fact, we might say that Holder "alters when he alternation finds"
(alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables, that is).
Most clearly, "-grams" should have secondary stress, since it does not
have lexical stress but is also unreduced, unlike the middle syllable of
"diagrams." "I" is naturally weak, but is a good candidate for promotion;
like "grams" it has an unreduced vowel sound and comes between other syllables
that are weaker than it is. In any case, most commentatorsboth literary
and linguistichave acknowledged that sequences of three unstressed syllables,
with the second of the three in an even-numbered position in the line (where
we would expect a stress, if we believe in expectation) fit easily into
iambic lines. Some readers would even give metrical stress to "them" because
of its place in the line, but because it is likely to be encliticized (weakly
pronounced, with a 'schwa' vowel, and attached to the end of the verb),
I would not. Thus, with the probable exception of the last word or foot,
we have an almost perfectly iambic line, and the part before the comma
is a plausible pentameter. (In fact, the line is even more patterned than
that.)
This is an odd argument. I agree with Holder that Finch sometimes goes
overboard in scrounging up evidence to fit her notion of "the ghost of
meter," but I can't see that he's improved the situation much. He seems
to be involved in a very similar operation to Finch's, except without reference
to the term "feet." If "all of two dactyls" is not enough to suggest a
dactylic rhythm, how can "all of two" stress clusters be enough to mark
the idea of clusters? And if Whitman was not, consciously or unconsciously,
trying for an iambic rhythm at the beginning, why did he move "poem" before
"proud" and "chanting" before "bring"? ("Proud poem" and "bring chanting"
would, after all, double the number of stress clusters dramatizing the
idea of "clusters.")
The double slashes are Mitchell's, and are meant to show phrase boundaries.
Holder finds no problems with these divisions, but does argue with what
Mitchell makes of them. Mitchell says that the count of phrases per line,
which goes 2-3-2-1, parallels "the emotion of the speaker whose agitation
over the nymph rises in the second line and then slowly disappears..."
. Holder counters that line 2 is "initially choppy" not to indicate the
speaker's "rising agitation," but to show
Where-e'er you walk,// cool Gales shall fan the Glade,
Trees,// where you sit,// shall crowd into a Shade,
Where-e'er you tread,// the blushing Flow'rs shall rise,
And all things flourish where you turn your Eyes.
Holder's reading of the poem is persuasive enough, but his linking that
reading to the phrase boundaries seems suspiciously ex post factothat
is, he decides what the line means, and then decides that the phrasing
of the line supports that meaning. Line 2 may be the most original image,
but it's hard to see that its action is any more fanciful than those in
the other lines; all involve natural forces changing themselves to pay
tribute to the nymph. Instead, it seems more likely that Pope changes the
word order in lines 2 and 4 to make the rhythm livelier and less monotonous,
and to lighten the rhetorical overkill that would be created by starting
four lines in a row with exactly the same type of clause.
something quite different, a posture that is at once genuinely
complimentary and playful, producing a marvelous picture of trees responding
to the presence of the "you" by bestirring themselves, pressing together
to make a shady shelter..." . Also, the line's initial impedance by the
two commas helps create, through contrast, a sense of quickening movement
through the rest of the line, appropriate to the intense, if fanciful,
action in describes: "shall crowd into a shade."
Holder notes that the A profile is associated with separateness (or terminality)
and with assertiveness; these properties make sense here. Furthermore,
this line contrasts with the first line of the passage, which has, in his
reading, "three sharply defined B profiles:"
The B profile is more or less the opposite of the A profile; it is associated
with connectedness, incompletion. So Holder sees a contrast between the
"interchangeable animals that still live. . . [and] the irrecoverability
of the unique Cordelia."
But if you try actually saying the line this way, you get an odd effect;
instead of a confident assertion, you get a rhetorical question: "Oh, no?
It is an ever fixed mark!" This would probably only occur in dialogue,
as a rebuttalfor example, as the response to: "It's not a fixed mark,
you know." A more likely reading would be as an A+A contour, with both
"O" and "no" receiving high accents that tail off downwards. Having misidentified
(in my view) the contour, he goes on to draw interpretive inferences from
it, and these are inevitably on shaky ground.
Though this is not the only possible reading, it seems plausible. Holder
goes on to quote Bolinger that B+A contours often represent "comments
that the audience is expected to take at face value" or else "talking to
oneself." Holder remarks, "Both of these observations can be seen
as applicable in the present instance. The speaker is declaring something
that he apparently expects to go unchallenged, and at the same time, .
. . may be engaged in a form of self-address. . .". This all sounds possible,
but these are remarks that apply to the whole poem, not just these four
wordsthey do not explain why this pattern on these four words. Furthermore,
since more than one contour is possible here, it is necessary for the performer
to decide what he or she means before assigning the words an intonational
patternso using the intonation to help with interpretation seems a bit
circular here. (This circularity would, however, vanish if the performer
and the prosodist were not the same person.)
I wouldn't read the line with this pitch outline, but let's say this is
how Holder would actually perform it. He labels it a B+B contour and goes
on to discuss its interpretation. But it looks like an A+A or perhaps A+B
contour to me; "me back" has the characteristic high accent followed by
a jump down that defines the A profile, and though "by" as diagrammed here
looks like a B profile (rise), that is an artifact of the fact that printing
is done in straight lines; the most plausible readings I could produce
all tailed off in pitch after the initial rise on "by." Another possibility
would be that it would be a high level tone, but that is very different
from high and rising, and the transcription does not show that difference.
In any case, these radical differences in labelling the same pattern underscore
the vagueness of these labels, and therefore of any interpretive inferences
we can draw from them.
In Joel Sherzer and Anthony Woodbury, eds.,
Native
American Discourse: Poetics and Rhetoric. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987.