Jespersen's System
In 1900, Otto Jespersen in his "Notes on Metre" was the first to use a four-stress system. He used the numbers 1 to 4, to indicate varying degrees of stress: strong, half-strong, half-weak, and weak. Steele (1999) and McAuley (1966) both use this as a secondary style of notation. Chomsky and Halle (1968) (in a linguistic, not specifically metrical context) use a similar notation, but in reverse: "1" signifying primary stress, "2" signifying secondary, etc.; some linguistically oriented descriptions of meter published thereafter used this notation, with "1" being the strongest stress.
Symbol | Syllable Type | Description |
4 | Strong | Heavy stress |
3 | Half-Strong | Medium Stress |
2 | Half-Weak | Medium-Light Syllable |
1 | Weak | Light syllable |
Read more about this topic: Systems Of Scansion
Famous quotes containing the word system:
“New York is more now than the sum of its people and buildings. It makes sense only as a mechanical intelligence, a transporter system for the daily absorbing and nightly redeploying of the human multitudes whose services it requires.”
—Peter Conrad (b. 1948)