Chapter 1 provided some background information on the authorship, audience, and the various cultural associations of English alliterative verse. Now we turn to the linguistic reference systems whose properties will be examined in the rest of the book. Verse material provides the testing ground for the study and it is therefore also necessary to state what principles are assumed to have governed the metrical organization of that material. Since the focus is on alliteration, the descriptive remarks will cover mostly prosodic features, limiting the comments on morphosyntax, vocabulary, and discourse to specific issues addressed in the subsequent chapters.

The prosody–meter interface

The ways in which meter adopts and adapts available linguistic structures for literary use is an important research area in linguistics. The two systems, the phonology of the language and the meters it uses, refer to the same fundamental distinctive categories and relations. In spite of the great variety of options available for the organization of metrical systems, not all features of language are harnessed into a specific verse form, but the phonological mainstays of verse are usually present also in the ambient language. The linguistic competence of the poet provides the raw material for verse, which modifies this material according to its own set of constraints. Reconstructing the past properties of a linguistic system is a major objective for historical linguistics; historical metrists, on the other hand, are concerned with the recovery and the definition of metrical patterns.