The Syntax of Old English Hypermetrics

Abstract

Most scholarship on hypermetric verse focuses exclusively on stress patterns. While understanding stress patterns is vital to understanding the structure and purpose of hypermetric metre as a whole, syntactic patterns are equally important and informative. A comparison of various syntactic features of normal and hypermetric verse shows that although some syntactic features, such as the regular adherence to Kuhn's laws, remain the same when the poets switch from normal to hypermetric verse, others, such as the placements of the verb and the frequency of poetic variation, differ substantially. These differences give the poet the tools to compose verses that allow for faster narrative progress that can more closely resemble normal speech patterns. The syntactic features of hypermetric verse therefore suggest that the poets might have had practical reasons, as well as rhetorical reasons, to employ the hypermetric line.

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