An analysis of Emily Dickinsons poems from the perspective of metrical phonology

Abstract

Metrical phonology deals with conventional phonological rules that govern verse language. Hayes and MacEachern (1998) and Kiparsky (2006) demonstrate that constraint-based OT frameworks can be fruitfully applied to model the metrical phonology of quatrains, a widely used verse tradition in English. However, the application of their analyses was restricted to musical quatrains. This paper extends the partially-ranked constraint analysis of quatrains in Kiparsky (2006) to literary data, namely, the poems of Emily Dickinson. It demonstrates that with some adjustments involving the addition of a well-motivated metrical constraint, the extended analysis can successfully capture not only the typology of attested quatrain types in Dickinsons work, but also their relative frequencies. The emerging discussion provides a linguistic perspective on how artistic innovations can emerge from a well-regulated metrical grammar.