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Rhyme in 16th-Century Hungarian Historical Songs: A Pilot Study
Maróthy, S. ; Seláf, L. ; Plecháč, Petr
This article presents a computer-based stichometric analysis of 26 Hungarian historical songs from the 16th century. We explore the validity of comments made by Albert Szenci Molnár in 1607 about the poor quality and simplicity of stanza structures in the poetry of previous generations. The study shows how rhyming changed in this poetic genre between 1539 and 1598. In this respect, it is the first work to explore these changes through a quantitative analysis. We find that during the examined period, there was a marked decline in the frequency of rhymes based on the repetition of the same word. At the same time, the tendency to maintain a rhyme across multiple stanzas did not change significantly.
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Quantitative Approaches to Versification
Plecháč, Petr ; Barry, P. ; Skulacheva, T. ; Bermúdez-Sabel, H. ; Kolár, Robert
This volume presents a wide range of quantitative approaches to versification. It comprises various methodological perspectives ranging from simple descriptive statistics to advanced machine learning methods (such as support vector machines, random forests or neural networks) as well as material covering a large span of time and languages: from very ancient versifications (Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittie, Ancient Greek), through medieval (Old English, Old Icelandic, Old Saxon) and Renaissance verse to modern experiments (free verse, concrete poetry), from English and Russian through Spanish and German to Portuguese and Catalan. Not only written, but also spoken poetry has been analyzed. The book covers multiple topics. What they all share in common is that versification is being studied in the context of other linguistic phenomena that may affect or determine it. Analyses of large corpora go hand in hand with comparative approaches. It is shown that quantitative approaches can be used for the purpose of authorship attribution, to build reasonable typologies as well as to understand why certain forms play such a dominant roles in our cultural tradition(s).
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Assessing the reliability of stress as a feature of authorship attribution in syllabic and accentual syllabic verse
Plecháč, Petr ; Birnbaum, D. J.
This work builds on a recent study by one of the authors, which shows that statistics about versification may be used as a feature in the process of authorship attribution. One such statistic is what we have called the stress profile of a poem, a vector consisting of frequencies of stressed syllables at particular metrical positions. Our initial hypothesis was that because syllabic versification (SV) regulates by definition the number of syllables in a line but not the distribution of stresses, it allows authors to individualize their rhythmical style much more than accentual syllabic versification (ASV), where the distribution of stresses is primarily determined by meter. For that reason, we expected the stress profile to be a more reliable indicator of authorship in Spanish SV than in Czech or German ASV. This hypothesis, however, was not supported by our analysis. For most of our samples, German ASV had lower accuracy than Spanish, which we had predicted, but, contrary to our expectations, the accuracy for Czech ASV and Spanish SV were more or less the same. This result led us to hypothesize further that the traditional labels SV and ASV were misleading and we sought to measure the tonic entropy of our data. In this case, Spanish SV, as expected, was found to be the least tonically regular, while there was a significant difference between the two ASV systems: the values for Czech were even closer to Spanish than to the low-scoring German system. This explains why our initial grouping of Czech and German together into a single ASV category was insufficiently nuanced.
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Tonic Verse and the Czech Language
Zindulková, Klára ; Heczková, Libuše (advisor) ; Wiendl, Jan (referee)
Chief subject of this work is a detailed description of the metrical structure of accentual verse and its place in the system of versifications. Definitions of this metrical system in the Czech theory of verse are compared to the international concepts of accentual verse. Then the category of isochrony is described. Isochrony is a property of language, on which the priciple of accentual verse is based on. In the next part of the work I present an overview of the types of accentual verse in Polish, English, Russian and German. Special attention is paid to the category of strict stress-verse, its relation to the accentual verse and also to some of Czech literary works. Further in the work I focus on metrical analysis of the texts written by five czech poets, which are more or less based on the accentual principle. The most attention is paid to the drama Faëthon by O. Theer. I elaborate on author's comments and critical reviews of his contemporaries, comparing them with the modern metrical descriptions. The last part is devoted to the problem of translating accentual verses into Czech, connecting this versification with "sylabotonic" translations of quantitative verse and also oral character of accentual versification in general.
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Interaction of the Metrical and Phonological Aspects of Language Constituting the Rhytm in Poetry
Zindulková, Klára ; Binar, Vladimír (advisor) ; Wiendl, Jan (referee)
The chief subject of this work is a detailed description of rhytmical structure of two versifications - accentual-syllabic verse and quantitative verse. Their rhytmical principles are compared to the rhytm of music, in order to find the analogies and differences. The task of the vocalic quantity is closely analyzed and the hypothetic interconnection of both versifications is explained in the next part of the work. Then I return to the theories of J. Král and O. Hostinský, comparing them with the modern metrical theories and mention the possible contribution of these theories to vocal music lyrics creation. Further in the work I concentrate on the connexion of textual and musical element in the vocal music, examining the rhytmical aspects of their interaction, especially the rhytmical effect of word and music accent. The task of pauses in three described rhytmical systems is examined afterwards.
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The Corpus of Czech Verse
Plecháč, Petr ; Kolár, Robert
In following we present the Corpus of Czech Verse (i.e. lemmatised, phonetically, morphologically, metrically and strophically annotated corpus of Czech poetry) and the online tools that give access to its data. The following online tools are described: Database of Czech metres, Gunstick, Hex, Euphonometer, and Babel. English presentation of these tools may be found in Plecháč, Kolár 2015 or at the website of Versification Research Group (http://versologie.cz/en/).
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