Peter Bleackley:
> I was wondering whether there was any correlation between the typology of
a
> language and the verse-forms it employs.
The is a programmatic but fascinating article on this by Patricia
Donnegan and David Stampe in CLS (Proc. of the nth regional meeting
of the Chicago Linguistic Society) from c. 1983. For the full
reference, I suggest either Google or Dirk; each is pretty reliable!
Dirk might also know whether Donnegan & Stampe took that work further
subsequently.
> I'll start a list of languages.
> Please contribute with corrections and additions, and we'll see if any
> pattern emerges.
D & S did claim there to be correlations of this sort. Definitely
worth ordering by ILL if you're interested.
--And.
> Language Mechanism Word order Verse-form
>
> Modern English Mixed SVO Stress-based feet
> French Mixed SVO Syllable counting
> Latin Inflecting SOV Length-based feet
> Japanese Agglutinating SOV Syllable counting
> Hebrew Inflecting VSO Parallelism
> Historical Germanic Inflecting SVO Alliterative verse
>
> Please stick to natlangs for the time being. We can discuss implications
> for our conlangs later.
>
> Pete
>