The reality of resolution in OE verse and its linguistic grounding

A clear understanding of syllabification is central to the account of most phonological processes; it is also an obligatory first step in the description of verse structure in English at any period of its history. As a basic unit of both prosody and meter, the syllable is an analytical tool which allows us to define the structure of verse and test the correspondences between the prosody of speech and ‘metered’ language. One of the general properties of the components of the syllable is that they are asymmetrical: in articulatory and perceptual terms onsets are more salient than codas; there are no languages in which the syllables must have codas, hence the principle of onset-maximal syllabification. Onset-maximal syllabification entails that a single intervocalic consonant will be associated with the onset of the second syllable, thus a VCV string will be syllabified V-CV, rather than *VC-V. Intervocalic clusters present a more complex problem: most commonly the first consonant forms the coda of the syllable to the left and the second consonant becomes the onset of the syllable to the right, but possible word-initial clusters such as sp-, st-, bl-, tr- etc. allow ambiguity, thus castel ‘castle’ could be ca-stel, or cas-tel, deofla ‘devil, gen. pl.’ could be deo-fla or deof-la.

The way one cuts up a string of sounds into syllables determines their weight: in English -(C)VV(C)(C)- and -(C)VC(C)- are heavy (H) and -(C)V- syllables are light (L). Thus the first syllables of Old English (OE) cēo-san ‘to choose,’ ēh-tan ‘to pursue,’ cnyt-tan ‘ to tie up,’ are heavy syllables, but the first syllables of ca-mel ‘camel,’ ca-non ‘canon,’ fi-nol ‘fennel’ are light. This reveals another asymmetry between onsets and codas: the presence or the composition of onsets does not affect syllable weight, thus all coda-less syllables in e.g. e-fe-te ‘newt’ are light, while even a single consonant in the coda, as in en-gel makes the syllable heavy.

These preliminary remarks are needed because in many verse traditions, including Old Germanic and Old English, syllable weight is a property which affects the metrical behavior of a syllable. One inviolable correspondence between meter and syllable weight in Old English verse is that a heavy syllable bearing primary stress must be the sole occupant of a metrical lift/ictus.