Matching ictus and stress in Latin hexameter endings

Lev Blumenfeld (Stanford)

Latin meter primarily controls syllable weight. Certain
restrictions on the distribution of word boundaries suggest
that word stress also plays a role in some meters. These claims,
however, have been controversial. In this talk I evaluate the
hypothesis that there is a preference for ictus and stress
alignment in the last two feet of Latin hexameter. In order to
test a poet's preference or dispreference of a line type, I
compare the corpus frequency of the line type to its frequency
in a set of computer-generated hexameters. Concentrating on the
corpora from two poets, Lucretius and Juvenal, I show that
ictus-stress alignment plays a crucial role in the distribution
of hexameter ending types. I demonstrate this both with pairwise
comparisons of ending types differing only in ictus-stress
alignment and with a complete OT-based model of the system.