Verse length
The length of the verse (length of the line of a poem, song, verse epic ...) can be determined in different ways by choosing any linguistic unit (for example letters, sounds, phonemes, morphs, syllables, words) and counting how many of them are in appear in a line of verse. It is a matter of quantitative stylistics or quantitative literary studies .
Possibilities of evaluating verse lengths
Wilhelm Fucks gave the suggestion to investigate verse lengths with the means of statistics . If you consider poems or verses as whole works, you can work on at least two research perspectives by evaluating the lengths of the lines:
- a stylistic one: do the viewed works differ in terms of the occurrence of different verse lengths?
- a linguistic or style theoretical one: are there certain mathematical models that are theoretically justified and can be proven as the principle of the distribution of verse lengths?
On the language / style theory approach
Early considerations were whether there was an ideal verse length; A. Ch. Vostokov (1817) assumed that lines of verse are ideally seven to eight syllables long, since longer verses cannot be handled in one go by the human language processing apparatus. BV Tomaševskij (1919/23) came to the conclusion in his investigations on the five-footed iambus with Puškin: "The longer a line of verse, the higher the proportion of unstressed even syllables."
The frequency of verse lengths is of new interest: In two studies, verse lengths were counted according to how many words per line of verse can be observed and how often the different lengths of verse occur in a particular work of art (Best 2012a, b). Examples were Heinrich Heine Atta Troll (27 chapters, each chapter in itself; Heine calls Caput ) and 20 poems by Gottfried August Bürger under the linguistic / style theoretical point evaluated. For this and some earlier studies it can be said that the hypothesis that verse lengths could be mathematically modeled was supported. It seems that verse lengths, determined by the number of their words, occur according to the binomial distribution . A total of 49 German-language texts / sections of text do not yet allow generalizations, but at least indicate that there could be something to the hypothesis mentioned . Perhaps a law of the distribution of verse lengths is indicated here , analogous to the law of the distribution of word lengths and several other language laws.
An example
To illustrate the distribution of the words on lines of verse, the following table is given for Friedrich Schiller's ballad The Diver :
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This ballad has 162 lines of verse. The table shows the following (using the 7-word verse as an example): Among the 162 lines of verse, there are 52 lines with 7 words; that is 32.10% of the verse lines. Since for verse lines at GA Bürger, JW v. Goethe and Heinrich Heine the binomial distribution has proven to be a good mathematical model (see above), this distribution was also applied to Schiller's Der Taucher ; the results are in the last column. The agreement of the model with the counted lines of verse is very good with P = 0.63. P is the probability of exceeding the chi-square test, which should be better than 0.05, which is given here. The binomial distribution also proves to be a good model for this further text.
literature
- Karl-Heinz Best : How many words are in a verse? Of exploration. In: S. Naumann, P. Grzybek, R. Vulanovic, G. Altmann (eds.): Synergetic linguistics. Text and language as dynamic systems . Pp. 13-22. Praesens, Vienna: 2012. ISBN 978-3-7069-0700-2 .
- Karl-Heinz Best: On the length of the verse at GA Bürger . In: Glottometrics 23, 2012, pp. 56–61 (PDF full text ).
- Karl-Heinz Best: To the length of the verse in Old Icelandic. In: Glottometrics 25, 2013, pp. 22–29 (PDF full text ).
- Ioan-Iovitz Popescu, Karl-Heinz Best, Gabriel Altmann : Unified Modeling of Length in Language . RAM-Verlag, Lüdenscheid 2014. ISBN 978-3-942303-26-2 . (Chapter "Verse length in words" pp. 91–93.)
- Andrew Wilson: Continuous Modeling of Verse Lengths in Welsh and Gaelic Metrical Psalmody. In: Emmerich Kelih, Róisín Knigth, Ján Mačutek, Andrew Wilson: Issues in Quantitative Linguistics 4. Dedicated to Reinhard Köhler on the occasion of his 65th birthday. RAM-Verlag, Lüdenscheid 2016. ISBN 978-3-942303-44-6 , pp. 228-236.
Individual evidence
- ^ Wilhelm Fucks : According to all the rules of art . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1968, page 78.
- ↑ Emmerich Kelih: History of the application of quantitative methods in Russian linguistics and literary studies. Kovač, Hamburg 2008, page 40. ISBN 978-3-8300-3575-6 . (Also dissertation Graz, 2007.)
- ↑ Emmerich Kelih: History of the application of quantitative methods in Russian linguistics and literary studies. Kovač, Hamburg 2008, page 109. ISBN 978-3-8300-3575-6 . (Also dissertation Graz, 2007.)
- ^ Charles Muller : Introduction to Language Statistics . Hueber, Munich 1972, page 68: data on Corneille: Rodogune ; Rüdiger Grotjahn: Linguistic and statistical methods in metrics and text science . Brockmeyer, Bochum 1979, ISBN 3-88339-062-3 , page 133: data on Goethe, Erlkönig and dance of death ; Tests on this in Best: How many words are in a verse?
- ^ Gejza Wimmer, Gabriel Altmann: Thesaurus of univariate discrete probability distributions. Stamm, Essen 1999, pages 21-28. ISBN 3-87773-025-6 .
- ↑ This table is not a takeover from the specialist literature, but an evaluation of the ballad made especially for this article.
