![]() ![]() There are also those who believe that prosody-or, rather, specific paralinguistic features of prosody-exists, like grammar, in particular bodies, to be awakened or cultivated by a particular kind of reading or hearing ear or a particular kind of feeling body. Linguistic prosodists-who have made significant advances in the field-are sidelined by the momentum of a literary history that has rendered their ongoing work too specialized for general use. Those who practice literary prosodic criticism in the 21st century tend to adopt a system of verse-measure with little interest in its history, or even with what linguistic prosodic critics might call a sharp disregard for its inaccuracy. In the conflicts over theories of prosody, adherents to one system attempt to convince adherents to another that theirs is superior, and these debates and conflicts continue unabated in linguistic prosodic criticism. Also, scholars agree that, like grammar, prosody as an interpretive system often hovers between the prescriptive and the descriptive. Despite the proliferation of conflicting theories, scholars who work on prosody nevertheless agree broadly that, like the subject of grammar under which prosody was historically a subset, prosody is a set of interrelated features in language that, according to how you measure these features, either appear to adhere to a particular system or do not. Thus, the theory of prosody might always be seen as the proliferation of conflicting theories about prosody, in no way limited to one national language in fact, theories of prosody from other languages applied to English are much older and more robust than theories of prosody that derive from only English-for instance, measuring English by Latin prosody, or French, or German, and so on. Each history of prosody therefore posits a new theory. That is, while there are theories of prosody that posit progression, there is little agreement about the evolution or even naming of prosodic systems. There is no one progress narrative of prosody, writ large, but the progress narrative of poetry within prosodic discourse is one of its main tropes. ![]() ![]() Because the measure of verse is subjective and historically contingent, debates and discussions about prosody are a constant and tend to repeat. The philological register of prosody may use versification in order to make a claim about how a verse-form reflects a national, historical, or even ethnic character, a practice that began in earnest during the mid-18th century and persists into the 21st century, though with some critical distance. Since the beginning of the 20th century scholars have also referred to prosody as a “poetics,” or a system of meaning-making, and do not directly engage in analysis of meter but rather use the term prosody to signify any aspect of literary style or figurative language that might contribute to the affective register of verse-form. Historically, prosody referred to the branch of grammar that contained versification as a subsection, but since the late 19th century literary scholars and poets have interchanged versification and prosody, while linguists use prosody to refer to pronunciation. Prosody refers, most broadly, to versification and pronunciation. ![]()
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