A History of English Versification. J. Schipper
At this point we have to note that there are two kinds of phonetic difference between syllables, either of which may serve as a foundation for rhythm. In the first place, syllables differ in respect of their quantity; they are either ‘long’ or ‘short’, according to the length of time required to pronounce them. In the second place, they differ in respect of the greater or less degree of force or stress with which they are uttered; or, as it is commonly expressed, in respect of their accent.
All the poetic rhythms of the Indogermanic or Aryan languages are based on one or other of these phonetic qualities of syllables, one group observing mainly the quantitative, and the other the accentual principle. Sanskrit, Greek, and Roman poetry is regulated by the principle of the quantity of the syllable, while the Teutonic nations follow the principle of stress or accent.[3] With the Greeks, Romans, and Hindoos the natural quantity of the syllables is made the basis of the rhythmic measures, the rhythmical ictus being fixed without regard to the word-accent. Among the Teutonic nations, on the other hand, the rhythmical ictus coincides normally with the word-accent, and the order in which long and short syllables succeed each other is (with certain exceptions in the early stages of the language) left to be determined by the poet’s sense of harmony or euphony.
§ 6. Before going further it will be well to define exactly the meaning of the word accent, and to give an account of its different uses. Accent is generally defined as ‘the stronger emphasis put on a syllable, the stress laid on it’, or, as Sweet[4] puts it, ‘the comparative force with which the separate syllables of a sound-group are pronounced.’ According to Brücke[5] it is produced by increasing the pressure of the breath. The stronger the pressure with which the air passes from the lungs through the glottis, the louder will be the tone of voice, the louder will be the sound of the consonants which the stream of air produces in the cavity of the mouth. This increase of tone and sound is what is called ‘accent’. Brücke seems to use tone and sound as almost synonymous, but in metric we must distinguish between them. Sound (sonus) is the more general, tone (τόνος) the more specific expression. Sound, in this general sense, may have a stronger or weaker tone. This strengthening of the tone is usually, not invariably, accompanied by a rise in the pitch of the voice, just as the weakening of the tone is accompanied by a lowering of the pitch. In the Teutonic languages these variations of stress or accent serve to bring into prominence the relative importance logically of the various syllables of which words are composed. As an almost invariable rule, the accent falls in these languages on the root-syllable, which determines the sense of the word, and not on the formative elements which modify that sense. This accent is an expiratory or stress accent.
It must be noted that we cannot, using the term in this sense, speak of the accent of a monosyllabic word when isolated, but only of its sound; nor can we use the word accent with reference to two or more syllables in juxtaposition, when they are all uttered with precisely the same force of voice. The term is significant only in relation to a variation in the audible stress with which the different syllables of a word or a sentence are spoken. This variation of stress affects monosyllables only in connected speech, where they receive an accentuation relative to the other words of the sentence. An absolute uniformity of stress in a sentence is unnatural, though the amount of variation in stress differs greatly in different languages. ‘The distinctions of stress in some languages are less marked than in others. Thus in French the syllables are all pronounced with a nearly uniform stress, the strong syllables rising only a little above the general level, its occurrence being also uncertain and fluctuating. This makes Frenchmen unable without systematic training to master the accentuation of foreign languages.’[6] English and the other Teutonic languages, on the other hand, show a marked tendency to alternate weak and strong stress.
§ 7. With regard to the function which it discharges in connected speech, we may classify accent or stress under four different categories. First comes what may be called the syntactical accent, which marks the logical importance of a word in relation to other words of the sentence. In a sentence like ‘the birds are singing’, the substantive ‘birds’ has, as denoting the subject of the sentence, the strongest accent; next in logical or syntactical importance comes the word ‘singing’, denoting an activity of the subject, and this has a comparatively strong accent; the auxiliary ‘are’ being a word of minor importance is uttered with very little force of voice; the article ‘the’, being the least emphatic or significant, is uttered accordingly with the slightest perceptible stress of all.
Secondly, we have the rhetorical accent, or as it might be called, the subjective accent, inasmuch as it depends upon the emphasis which the speaker wishes to give to that particular word of the sentence which he desires to bring prominently before the hearer. Thus in the sentence, ‘you have done this,’ the rhetorical accent may fall on any of the four words which the speaker desires to bring into prominence, e.g. ‘yóu (and no one else) have done this,’ or ‘you háve done this (though you deny it), or you have dóne this’ (you have not left it undone), or, finally, ‘you have done thís’ (and not what you were told). This kind of accent could also be termed the emphatic accent.
Thirdly, we have the rhythmical accent, which properly speaking belongs to poetry only, and often gives a word or syllable an amount of stress which it would not naturally have in prose, as, for instance, in the following line of Hamlet (iii. iii. 27)—
My lord, he’s going to his mother’s closet,
the unimportant word ‘to’ receives a stronger accent, due to the influence of the rhythm, than it would have in prose. Similarly in the following line of Chaucer’s Troilus and Cryseide, l. 1816—
For thóusandés his hóndes máden dýe,
the inflexional syllable es was certainly not ordinarily pronounced with so much stress as it must have here under the influence of the accent as determined by the rhythm of the line. Or again the word ‘writyng’, in the following couplet of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Prol. 325–6)—
Therto he couthe endite and make a thing,
Ther couthe no wight pynche at his writyng,
was certainly not pronounced in ordinary speech with the same stress on the last syllable as is here demanded both by the rhythm and rhyme.
As a rule, however, the rhythmical accent in English coincides with the fourth kind of accent, the etymological or word-accent, which we now have to deal with, and in greater detail.
Just as the different words of a sentence are pronounced, as we have seen, with varying degrees of stress, so similarly the different syllables of a single word are uttered with a varying intensity of the force of the breath. One of the syllables of the individual word is always marked off from the rest by a greater force of tone, and these others are again differentiated from each other by subordinate gradations of intensity of utterance, which may sometimes be so weak as to lead to a certain amount of indistinctness, especially in English. In the Teutonic languages, the root-syllable, as the most important element of the word, and that which conveys the meaning, always bears the chief accent, the other syllables bearing accents which are subordinate to this chief accent. As the etymology of a word is always closely associated with the form of the root-syllable, this syllabic accent may be called the etymological accent. It naturally happens that this syllabic accent coincides very often with the syntactical accent, as the syntactical stress must be laid on the syllable which has the etymological accent.
The degrees of stress on the various syllables may be as many in number as the number of the syllables of the word in question. It is sufficient, however, for purposes of metre and historical grammar, to distinguish only four degrees of accent in polysyllabic words. These four degrees of syllabic and etymological accent are as follows: 1. the chief accent (Hochton, Hauptton); 2. the subsidiary accent (Tiefton, Nebenton); 3. the absence of accent, or the unaccented degree (Tonlosigkeit); 4. the mute degree, or absence of sound (Stummheit). These last three varieties of accent arise from the nature of the Teutonic accent, which is, it must always be remembered, a stress-accent in which the volume of breath is expended mainly on the first or chief syllable. The full meaning of these