Linguistics 300, F09, Assignment 2

As mentioned in Assignment 1, you will be determining word stress in French loanwords in earlier stages of English by scanning verse texts by Chaucer (Middle English) and Shakespeare (Early Modern English). In order to draw valid conclusions about the verse data, you will need to know about English meter - both the basic meters our two authors used and the exceptions to the strict metrical templates that they allowed themselves. For instance, the first foot in Shakespearean iambic pentameter can be either an iamb or trochee, and so is generally not as informative as the remaining four feet.

Your assignment is to get together with your partner (see below) and find some websites on meter, especially English meter, that promise to be helpful in connection with our project. The sites can be at Penn or elsewhere. I expect that you'll be able to make a lot of headway on the assignment in class on Wedneday, and at the end of the class, we'll discuss an appropriate deadline to submit your results.

Here are the groups for this assignment and the remainder of the phonology project. As luck would have it, the class is evenly divided between students who have taken (or are currently taking) Ling 103, "Language structure and verbal art," and those who haven't. We'll shuffle the groups for the syntax project.

Harris Bunsu
Keller Tyshkevich
Lillback Britt
Pellegrini Daidone
Perlman Yiu
Prebenda Kowalski
Stults D'Onofrio, Fuchs
Russell Oliver-Li
Wallace Morgenstern