Linguistics 300, F09, Assignment 5

• Chaucer concordance
• Shakespeare concordance
• Meter and scanning

In the last assignment, you collected information concerning the etymology and synchronic (British) stress on "your" set of French loanwords. In this assignment, you will collect data on how these words were stressed in earlier stages of English. The work will proceed in three stages, described in more detail below. The first stage consists of simply collecting citations for the individual words from the concordances. The second stage consists of noting any special characteristics of the citations that will affect the amount of information we can glean from them. The final stage consists of actually determining (as far as possible) a word's stress in the earlier stages of English.

I think it will be easiest to do the three stages (especially the last stage) on separate passes through the data, but you should feel free to use your own judgment in how you organize the work. Eventually, the information from the third stage will get recorded in the same worksheet as the information from Assignment 4. Based on what you find in this assignment, we'll figure out how to do that (how many columns we'll need, and so on). So for the moment, record the information you find on the separate worksheets for Chaucer and Shakespeare.

A. Look up "your" words in the concordances for Chaucer and Shakespeare and record the results in a spreadsheet. For Chaucer, use the entire Canterbury Tales (except for the Parson's Tale and the Tale of Melibee, which are in prose). For Shakespeare, start with the plays. If you have time, you can include the sonnets.

• Please look up even those words that have no synchronic stress information, as they might still occur in the concordances.
• As you've already had a chance to see from some of the OED entries, earlier stages of English exhibited quite a bit of spelling variation, so look up and down the entries (in the Chaucer concordance) and use wildcard characters in your searches as appropriate (in the Shakespeare concordance).
• If a word is used very often, stop at 10 citations (since more citations are unlikely to alter the results for any particular word), but indicate that there are more citations.
• For each author, cut and paste the lines containing each word. If the line contains the word in rhyme position, you can save yourself a separate pass in connection with (B) by cutting and pasting line together with the matching rhyming line.
• Please also cut and paste some source information (work and line number) in a separate column from the citations themselves; it makes it easier to locate the individual instances later on if we have to.

B. At this stage, note special properties of the citations that will affect how much information we can glean from each citation. Here are some considerations to bear in mind. See Meter and scanning for more information.

• In general, iambic pentameter gives us conclusive information concerning stress for words with two syllables, since there are only two ways that such words can fit the meter (either the first syllable falls on a weak beat and the second syllable falls on the following strong beat, or vice versa). However, when a word has more than two syllables, we can tell where the alternating stresses go, but we can't tell which of these stresses is primary. But if a word rhymes with another one, it generally becomes possible to tell where the primary stress falls. So make a note of any rhyme information for the particular citation for which it is relevant (say, "rhymes with moon").
• Elision can also give us information concerning word stress, since only unstressed syllables can be elided. Again, make relevant notes (for instance, "penultimate elided").
• Chaucer is quite strict about matching stressed and unstressed syllabes to the metrical template of iambic pentameter (or tetrameter). Later poets, however, allowed themselves a bit more freedom. For instance (among other variations), Shakespeare allows the first foot of iambic pentameter to be either an iamb or a trochee (see Meter and scanning for more discussion of such variation). Because of this, if a word occupies the first foot in Shakespeare, we can't tell anything about the stress on those two syllables. Exclude such citations and use ones that are more informative.
• Some lines won't scan because they aren't in meter at all!

C. This is the most challenging part of the assignment, where you figure out what the data from the citations tell you about the stress pattern for the word.

The guiding principle for this part of the assignment is to make the most informative choice that is consistent with the evidence. On the one hand, you shouldn't force a choice between two possibilities if you don't have evidence for the choice. On the other hand, you shouldn't avoid making a choice if you do have relevant evidence. See below for more discussion.

• As noted earlier, sometimes it is clear that stress can't fall on some syllable(s), but it isn't clear which syllable bears the primary stress. For instance, in iambic pentameter, it might be clear that a trisyllabic word can't be stressed on the penultimate syllable (2) because that syllable scans weak. But both adjacent syllables scan strong, so it isn't clear whether the stress falls on the ultimate syllable (1) or on the antepenultimate (3). In such cases, it is important to record only the information that you have evidence for, and no more. In a case like this, record "ambiguous 1 or 3" or "amb 1 or 3" for short.
• An ambiguous case like the one just discussed is distinct from a case of variation. In an ambiguous case, there is no way to know from the data which syllable bears the primary stress. In a case of variation, on the other hand, the data gives unambiguous evidence for two (or more) distinct stress patterns. For instance, if the first syllable in a (made-up) word like gavon sometimes scans weak and sometimes strong (even just once in either case), record it as "variable 1 or 2" or "var 1 or 2" for short.
• If the evidence for a word is mostly ambiguous, but there is information from rhyme or elision that nails the stress on the word, record the more informative choice (that is, "1" or "3" rather than "amb 1 or 3" in such a case).
• Combinations of ambiguous and variable are possible. For instance, a four-syllable word might scan as ambiguous between 1 and 3 in some lines and ambiguous between 2 and 4 in others. You could record this as "varies between amb 1 or 3, amb 2 or 4".
• Finally, the number of syllables might differ in the historical data from the number that you found for Modern British English. If need be, we'll come up with conventions to cover such cases.