A principle of balancing non-alternation and alternation in tonal metres

Wang, Yuxuan Melody. (under revision). A principle of balancing non-alternation and alternation in tonal metres. Studies in Prosodic Grammar.

Abstract: Poetic metres can govern the basic rhythmic patterns of verses and lines, and generally require the phonetic attributes they regulate (e.g. stress, weight, and/or tone) to alternate within a line to avoid monotony. This paper proposes a new principle, namely that metre can balance both alternation and non-alternation within a line, using Middle Chinese regulated verse as an example. I argue that the canonical metrical templates of regulated verse require tones to alternate within a line, but only to a restricted extent. Beyond analysing the surface templates, the paper provides further support by showing that the guping (孤平) phenomenon in regulated verse can be analysed in Optimality Theory using constraints that encode alternation and non-alternation. Finally, I show that this balancing property of regulated verse metre not only enriches the crosslinguistic typology of poetic metres, but also illustrates how metres can be informed by – and thus serves as a window into – natural language phonology.