Notes On Prosody - Terminology

Terminology

The word stress is reserved for the underlying unvarying pattern of the iambic rhythm, and the word accent is used to describe where the accent falls in speaking a line.

He introduces the notion of a scud, which he defines to be an unaccented stress (page 9).

He describes a number of types of scuds (page 18):

• tilted scud — an inversion, where the accent falls on the first syllable of an iambic foot, of which there are various types:
  • split tilt — an accented monosyllable followed by an unaccented one
  • short tilt — an accented monosyllable followed by an unaccented first syllable of a polysyllabic word
  • duplex tilt — a disyllabic word where the accent falls on the first syllable in ordinary speech
  • long tilt — the first two syllables of a trisyllabic word, where the first syllable is accented in ordinary speech
• reverse tilt — an unaccented stress followed by an accented depression (non-stress) (thereby falling across two iambic feet) the main variety of which is the:
  • split reverse tilt — two monosyllables the first not accented and the second accented (i.e. the fairly common xx// ending to line)
  • duplex reverse tilt — a disyllabic word accented on the second syllable 'against the grain' of stress-unstress; Nabokov somewhat misinterprets Robert Bridges discussion of "Recession of accent" in his book Milton's Prosody, claiming that Bridges 'designates' the duplex reverse tilt as 'recession of accent', whereas Bridges starts from the phenomenon of 'recession of accent' as analysed by Alexander Schmidt and proceeds to analyse possible occurrences of it in Milton's verse.