I am a first-year post-baccalaureate student at Columbia University. My research interests include language documentation, language pedagogy, (theoretical) pragmatics, and conversation. I have also done work in generative metrics, ancient comedy, and ancient epistolography. I received my MA in Latin from the University of Texas at Austin in 2024, shortly after my Texas state EC-12 Teaching Certification; I earned my BA in linguistics in 2022, from the same institution.
Examinations of the heroic clausula have to date been primarily concerned with oratory, but there... more Examinations of the heroic clausula have to date been primarily concerned with oratory, but there are other genres of prose that have been left unconsidered. Shipley (1911) discusses Cicero’s oratory and Quintilian’s treatise-writing, but analyses of prose rhythms in narrative historical accounts or commentaries have not appeared. Previous studies have examined, at length, heroic clausulae among only a few authors (Shipley 1911), in much broader scope among vast corpora of prose texts of varying genre (Keeline & Kirby 2019), and, in particular, various interpretations of the extratextual or connotative meaning of the heroic clausula specific to oratory (Adams 2013). It is this last paper that serves as a motivator for mine: could it be the case that the heroic clausula maintains a similar “inappropriate” or extraordinary meaning in genres other than that to which Adams’ discussion is limited? Caesar, more known for his memoirs than his oratory, is among the authors surveyed in Keeline & Kirby, whose data indicate that 23 heroic clausulae appear in the first book of the Bellum Civile. Adams contends that Cicero employs the heroic clausula, specifically, to encode an intentional irony or inappropriateness of the situation, and I ask the same question of Caesar. Like rhyme in formal English literature, the heroic clausula is said to represent a similar odd-sounding prosodic (or phonetic) feature, and like the rhyme, I expect this oddness to pervade literature of any genre (Grillo 2015). What follows explores Caesar’s Civil War, a work of a genre whose prosaic rhythm patterns have yet to be exhaustively analyzed, in an attempt to understand similar intentionality or rhetorical force in the heroic clausula in Caesar and perhaps claim that the extraordinariness that heroic clausulae encode in prose is a cross-genre phenomenon.
This remains a draft because it does not incorporate the conclusions in Ryan (2017).
This stud... more This remains a draft because it does not incorporate the conclusions in Ryan (2017).
This study uses a generative metrics framework to analyze rhythmic constraints on Latin elegiac couplets. The corpus examined includes 1,116 couplets written by five poets who lived between c. 84 BCE and c. 100 CE. While many studies have examined Latin poetry (and, indeed, Latin elegy) in great detail (Greenberg 1987; Platnauer 1951), none has taken advantage of the methodologies in more recent generative metrics surveys of other languages’ poetries. The analytical approach in the present study is inspired by Hayes & MacEachern (1998), a comprehensive generative metrics analysis of quatrains in English fold verse, and by Golston & Riad (2000), a constraint-based study of Greek meter. Both use frameworks based on Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 2004) and propose that metrical structures can be described in terms of formal constraints whose rankings can vary across individual languages. I repurpose this idea here to describe Latin elegy in terms of stress rhythm. Long-held views about the ancient poets’ metrical preferences (Allen 1973; Bennett 1898; Halporn et al. 1963; Sturtevant 1923), already have us well-equipped to develop a formal analysis of the rhythmic characteristics of Latin elegy. Of even more help to my goals are recent studies of Latin stress (Apoussidou & Boersma 2003) and metrical structure, more generally (Hayes 1995). The goal of this study is to define elegiac couplets in these terms, to evaluate interplay between prosodic prominence (stress in Latin words) and underlying metrical beats (or intervals in the prescribed poetic template), and to ascertain whether rhythm can be used to explain form.
The use of first-person plural in this paper is meant to include myself and the reader. This is an undergraduate honors thesis, and I want to thank my wonderful supervisor, Dr. Megan Crowhurst, for her invaluable feedback throughout this process.
Examinations of the heroic clausula have to date been primarily concerned with oratory, but there... more Examinations of the heroic clausula have to date been primarily concerned with oratory, but there are other genres of prose that have been left unconsidered. Shipley (1911) discusses Cicero’s oratory and Quintilian’s treatise-writing, but analyses of prose rhythms in narrative historical accounts or commentaries have not appeared. Previous studies have examined, at length, heroic clausulae among only a few authors (Shipley 1911), in much broader scope among vast corpora of prose texts of varying genre (Keeline & Kirby 2019), and, in particular, various interpretations of the extratextual or connotative meaning of the heroic clausula specific to oratory (Adams 2013). It is this last paper that serves as a motivator for mine: could it be the case that the heroic clausula maintains a similar “inappropriate” or extraordinary meaning in genres other than that to which Adams’ discussion is limited? Caesar, more known for his memoirs than his oratory, is among the authors surveyed in Keeline & Kirby, whose data indicate that 23 heroic clausulae appear in the first book of the Bellum Civile. Adams contends that Cicero employs the heroic clausula, specifically, to encode an intentional irony or inappropriateness of the situation, and I ask the same question of Caesar. Like rhyme in formal English literature, the heroic clausula is said to represent a similar odd-sounding prosodic (or phonetic) feature, and like the rhyme, I expect this oddness to pervade literature of any genre (Grillo 2015). What follows explores Caesar’s Civil War, a work of a genre whose prosaic rhythm patterns have yet to be exhaustively analyzed, in an attempt to understand similar intentionality or rhetorical force in the heroic clausula in Caesar and perhaps claim that the extraordinariness that heroic clausulae encode in prose is a cross-genre phenomenon.
This remains a draft because it does not incorporate the conclusions in Ryan (2017).
This stud... more This remains a draft because it does not incorporate the conclusions in Ryan (2017).
This study uses a generative metrics framework to analyze rhythmic constraints on Latin elegiac couplets. The corpus examined includes 1,116 couplets written by five poets who lived between c. 84 BCE and c. 100 CE. While many studies have examined Latin poetry (and, indeed, Latin elegy) in great detail (Greenberg 1987; Platnauer 1951), none has taken advantage of the methodologies in more recent generative metrics surveys of other languages’ poetries. The analytical approach in the present study is inspired by Hayes & MacEachern (1998), a comprehensive generative metrics analysis of quatrains in English fold verse, and by Golston & Riad (2000), a constraint-based study of Greek meter. Both use frameworks based on Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 2004) and propose that metrical structures can be described in terms of formal constraints whose rankings can vary across individual languages. I repurpose this idea here to describe Latin elegy in terms of stress rhythm. Long-held views about the ancient poets’ metrical preferences (Allen 1973; Bennett 1898; Halporn et al. 1963; Sturtevant 1923), already have us well-equipped to develop a formal analysis of the rhythmic characteristics of Latin elegy. Of even more help to my goals are recent studies of Latin stress (Apoussidou & Boersma 2003) and metrical structure, more generally (Hayes 1995). The goal of this study is to define elegiac couplets in these terms, to evaluate interplay between prosodic prominence (stress in Latin words) and underlying metrical beats (or intervals in the prescribed poetic template), and to ascertain whether rhythm can be used to explain form.
The use of first-person plural in this paper is meant to include myself and the reader. This is an undergraduate honors thesis, and I want to thank my wonderful supervisor, Dr. Megan Crowhurst, for her invaluable feedback throughout this process.
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This study uses a generative metrics framework to analyze rhythmic constraints on Latin elegiac couplets. The corpus examined includes 1,116 couplets written by five poets who lived between c. 84 BCE and c. 100 CE. While many studies have examined Latin poetry (and, indeed, Latin elegy) in great detail (Greenberg 1987; Platnauer 1951), none has taken advantage of the methodologies in more recent generative metrics surveys of other languages’ poetries. The analytical approach in the present study is inspired by Hayes & MacEachern (1998), a comprehensive generative metrics analysis of quatrains in English fold verse, and by Golston & Riad (2000), a constraint-based study of Greek meter. Both use frameworks based on Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 2004) and propose that metrical structures can be described in terms of formal constraints whose rankings can vary across individual languages. I repurpose this idea here to describe Latin elegy in terms of stress rhythm. Long-held views about the ancient poets’ metrical preferences (Allen 1973; Bennett 1898; Halporn et al. 1963; Sturtevant 1923), already have us well-equipped to develop a formal analysis of the rhythmic characteristics of Latin elegy. Of even more help to my goals are recent studies of Latin stress (Apoussidou & Boersma 2003) and metrical structure, more generally (Hayes 1995). The goal of this study is to define elegiac couplets in these terms, to evaluate interplay between prosodic prominence (stress in Latin words) and underlying metrical beats (or intervals in the prescribed poetic template), and to ascertain whether rhythm can be used to explain form.
The use of first-person plural in this paper is meant to include myself and the reader. This is an undergraduate honors thesis, and I want to thank my wonderful supervisor, Dr. Megan Crowhurst, for her invaluable feedback throughout this process.
This study uses a generative metrics framework to analyze rhythmic constraints on Latin elegiac couplets. The corpus examined includes 1,116 couplets written by five poets who lived between c. 84 BCE and c. 100 CE. While many studies have examined Latin poetry (and, indeed, Latin elegy) in great detail (Greenberg 1987; Platnauer 1951), none has taken advantage of the methodologies in more recent generative metrics surveys of other languages’ poetries. The analytical approach in the present study is inspired by Hayes & MacEachern (1998), a comprehensive generative metrics analysis of quatrains in English fold verse, and by Golston & Riad (2000), a constraint-based study of Greek meter. Both use frameworks based on Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 2004) and propose that metrical structures can be described in terms of formal constraints whose rankings can vary across individual languages. I repurpose this idea here to describe Latin elegy in terms of stress rhythm. Long-held views about the ancient poets’ metrical preferences (Allen 1973; Bennett 1898; Halporn et al. 1963; Sturtevant 1923), already have us well-equipped to develop a formal analysis of the rhythmic characteristics of Latin elegy. Of even more help to my goals are recent studies of Latin stress (Apoussidou & Boersma 2003) and metrical structure, more generally (Hayes 1995). The goal of this study is to define elegiac couplets in these terms, to evaluate interplay between prosodic prominence (stress in Latin words) and underlying metrical beats (or intervals in the prescribed poetic template), and to ascertain whether rhythm can be used to explain form.
The use of first-person plural in this paper is meant to include myself and the reader. This is an undergraduate honors thesis, and I want to thank my wonderful supervisor, Dr. Megan Crowhurst, for her invaluable feedback throughout this process.