A generative basic metrical analysis of English and Arabic metrical verse

Abstract EN

Challenging it is to start off a metrical analysis with a new approach after many a theory from various disciplines has already been proposed.

This is why no new theory is suggested or applied, from elsewhere, in this study; rather, a serious attempt to foreground the core concepts of metrical variations and/or deviations of English and Arabic metrical systems and to minimize the diverse theoretical efforts, exerted by prosodists, is intended.

It is into the discipline of generative metrics that this tentative framework of analysis should be incorporated, for it moves in the direction of defining meters through a set of generative[1] rules and conditions, not through listing meters and describing them in detail (see Youmans, 1989).