Linguistic Change and Metre: A Reply.
- Author/Editor
- Weiskott, Eric.
- Title
- Linguistic Change and Metre: A Reply.
- Published
- Weiskott, Eric. "Linguistic Change and Metre: A Reply." Notes and Queries 268 (2023): 54-55.
- Review
- The essay constitutes a reply to Ad Putter's "Linguistic Change and Metre: The Demise of Adjectival Inflections and the Scansion of 'high' and 'sly' in Chaucer, Gower and Hoccleve" (English Language and Linguistics 26 (2022): 471–85), which argued that while Gower and Chaucer typically did not often deviate from the grammatical principles of final -e as an adjectival inflection, the examples of "high" and "sly" in their poetry demonstrate the vulnerability of final -e when following vowels. In Putter's view, these words therefore provide examples of the gradual loss of adjectival inflections in English. Weiskott counters Putter's linguistic analysis by noting a long-acknowledged metrical subrule specifying that "the inflectional -e of weak adjectives regularly drops out of metre before a word with aft stress" (54). Putter draws on thirty-one uses of "high" and "sly" in Chaucer, Gower and Hoccleve's works: twenty-eight of these, Weiskott argues, are accounted for according to this subrule. He identifies a metrical rather than grammatical reason for the alternating use or omission of final -e, which is that its usage is determined by the metrical shape of the next word in the line. Weiskott concludes, contra Putter, that "Chaucer and Gower, in their high-minded and traditionalist way, treat 'high' and 'sly' as metrically equivalent to any other monosyllabic adjective" (55). [RM. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2]
- Date
- 2023
- Gower Subjects
- Language and Word Studies
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification