Word foot

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In verse, the word foot denotes a semantic-rhythmic unit similar to the colon .

Conceptual history and meaning

The “word foot” is a term coined by the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803). In the context of his verse theory (cf. “Vom German Hexameter”, 1779) the word foot is the smallest rhythmic unit and thus subordinate to period and stanza . In contrast to the “artificial” verse foot (e.g. iambus , trochaeus, dactyl, etc.), the word foot is not a rhythmic abstraction, but is derived from a specific linguistic environment, from one or more words. In contrast to the colon, the word base has a meaning . The foot of the word and foot of the verse can also be identical (see the example "The summer night" below).

The following example from Klopstock (cf. “Vom German Hexameter”, pp. 184/185) illustrates the distinction between word base and verse base. The hexameter

"The winged thunder song resounded terribly in the host."

can be subdivided into six "artificial" feet (five dactyls and one spondeus )

- uu terrible he
- uu scholl the ge
- uu winged
- uu Donnerge
- uu sang in the
- - Host.

and four feet of words

- uu - sounded terrible
uu - uu the winged
- uu - thunder song
uu - - in the host.

Contrary to the literary historical meaning of “word foot” and “word foot rhythm”, the term has only rudimentarily established itself in the verse teachings of the 19th and 20th centuries due to its strong embedding in Klopstock's hermetic metric theory .

The root of the word in Klopstock's metric theory

Klopstock tries to grasp the essence of poetic language as “word movement”, assuming a “conceptual syllable time” for German. The stem syllable stress of German prosody always puts the stress on the part of the word that carries the meaning. Klopstock concludes from this that this fact of spoken language must also be taken into account in poetic language if it is to appear natural and to convince the listener. This is done by introducing the term “word foot”.

In contrast to the rhythmically abstract verse foot, the word foot is linguistically and semantically fulfilled rhythm that is tied to a word or a word combination that belongs together. This temporal-material filling or fulfillment of the rhythm as the foot of a word expresses itself in two ways: qualitatively and quantitatively.

Qualitatively, this is the case with the term “tone behavior” and the associated assignments of meaning. Klopstock compiles a catalog of 44 feet of words, which are classified according to their semantic “nature” into “soft”, “strong”, “humorous”, “violent”, “serious”, “happy” and “restless”. The classification criterion for the “tonal behavior” of a word base is the concrete sequence of stressed and unstressed syllables within this semantic-rhythmic unit.

In contrast, Klopstock calls the purely quantitative, proportional relationship more stressed to unstressed syllables “time expression”. However, this is less obvious at the foot of the word than at the level of the whole stanza. In the “expression of time”, in the quantitative preponderance of stressed or unstressed syllables, the criterion is whether a stanza (or a word footer) is perceived as fast or slow. According to Klopstock, many unstressed syllables speed up the meter, many stressed syllables slow it down.

For Klopstock, the decisive factor here is the perception of what is being heard:

“The artificial ones hidden in the feet of words do not concern the listener at all. He doesn't hear her; he only hears the feet of the word: and, according to these alone, makes his judgment about the verse. " (Vom German Hexameter, p. 185)

The rhythmic movement of the word foot or a sequence of word feet, which carries the meaning in the rhythm, is perceived directly by the senses and understood "physically":

“We do not get the ideas which the words, according to their sense, produce in us, not quite as quickly as those which arise through the words, according to their movement. There we first transform the sign into what is designated; here the movement seems to us to be what it expresses. " (Vom German Hexameter, p. 207)

Examples

The summer night

uu - u, uu - u, uu -,
uu - u, uu -, uu - u,
uu - u, uu - u,
uu - uu -.
When the shimmer of the moon now descends
In the woods pours, and smells
With the scents of the linden tree
Waving in the coolings;
So thoughts of the grave surround me
The beloved, and I see in the forest
Just dawn and it blows me
Not from the flower.
I once enjoyed it with you, O you dead!
How the fragrance and the cooling wafted around us,
How beautiful you were by the moon
You beautiful nature!

The ode “Die Sommernacht” (1766) follows a stanza scheme that comes from Klopstock himself and precedes the text , which, in its structure according to the feet of words, reveals above all the third päon (uu - u), which occurs six times in each stanza. This rhythm, which encompasses the entire poem, evokes a single, constant mood due to its constant presence, namely the summer night mood of yesteryear, which Klopstock was able to experience together with his now dead friends and which can now be felt again qua rhythm. The tonal behavior of this third peon comes from the category “Muntres” and only at first glance seems to be inappropriate to the elegiac mood, because it evokes not this, but the mood of yesteryear, ie the hours of intimate get-together with friends. Klopstock not only expresses this intimacy , he realizes this intimacy by means of the rhythmic structure of the text at the moment when the ode sounds, so that it can be physically experienced.

In Klopstock's free rhythmic odes, which no longer follow a schema to be fulfilled, the effects of the feet of words and the rhythm of the feet of words , which are already evident here, reach their climax, which is also significant for the subsequent development of literary history, in the coincidence of meter and rhythm.

The following 21st stanza from the ode "Die Kunst Tialfs" (1767) shows this process in verses 3 and 4:

From Normann's Sky. He is clothed in the light bark of the seal;
He stands bent on it, and shoots, with the speed of lightning,
Down the mountains!
Then slowly work your way up the snow rock again.

The short third verse (uu - u -), which portrays the movement of the skier's descent, stands opposite the long fourth verse, which trudges uphill with heavy steps (- uu, - u, - u, - u, u -, u - - u). The decisive rhythmic change of direction between "again" and "up" (- u, u -) and the arrival on the plateau "at the snow rock" (u - - u) lead in rhythmic terms to poems such as Holderlin's "Half of Life" where, through additions such as “the walls stand / speechless and cold” (u - u - / - uu -), similar rhythmic changes of direction determine a new form that has broken away from metrics and consists of autonomously set rhythms that act against each other.

Literary historical significance and effect

Klopstock's invention of the initially syntactically and rhetorically structured free rhythms (first in the ode "Die Eresung", composed in 1754) experienced a momentous reorientation due to the idea of ​​word movement and the introduction of the word base and the word base rhythm based on it, which is comparable to the musical historical turn after the Viennese classic . Up to and including the Viennese Classic, Western music is characterized by a tense "togetherness of time structure and sound" (Bockholdt, p. 12), of (abstract) meter and (material) rhythm. In the music of the 19th and 20th centuries this tension disappears, in its place the sound, the material, i.e. H. the rhythm kicks in. The previous relativity is dissolved into the absoluteness of what is sounding. With Klopstock's word foot rhythm, an analogous process of autonomizing the rhythm takes place. Instead of the relative tension between meter and rhythm, the absolute autonomous rhythm comes with the foot of the word. Combined with a concrete meaning and the recalling, repeating function, the footer is very close to Richard Wagner's leitmotif.

literature

  • Mark Emanuel Amtstätter: Tones with a soul. The language of the body and poetry in Klopstock's ice rink (= studies and texts on the social history of literature. Volume 107). Tübingen 2005.
  • Rudolf Bockholdt: About the advantages of perceiving a material-free time structure in music . In: Archives for Musicology . 59, 2002, pp. 1-32.
  • Hans-Heinrich Hellmuth: Metric invention and metric theory with Klopstock (= studies and sources for the history of verse. Volume 4). Munich 1973.
  • Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock: From the German hexameter. In: AL Back, ARC Spindler (Ed.): Klopstock's all linguistic and aesthetic writings. Volume III (= all works. Volume 15). Leipzig 1830, pp. 85-220.
  • Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock: The summer night, the art of Tialfs. In: Franz Muncker, Jaro Pawel (ed.): Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock: Oden. With the support of the Klopstockverein zu Quedlinburg. 2 volumes. Stuttgart 1889, pp. 179/180 and 215-219.