Contenu du sommaire : Métrique française et métrique accentuelle, sous la direction de Dominique Billy, Benoît de Cornulier et Jean-Michel Gouvard

Everybody knows how fine was the lyric art of the troubadours. Among the different aspects of this art, the most elaborate was the way they regulated the recurrence of the same sounds, and sometimes the same words, at the line-ends. This papers deals with this matter, proposing a grammar of these technical devices.

The structure of regular groups of lines (strophes) in traditional French poetry is analysed in the work of Victor Hugo. A characterization of a prominent type, here called strophe classique, is proposed. Exceptions to that type are analysed according to how they differ from it.

By scanning the distribution of morpheme and word boundaries in alexandrine lines, one may work out regularities which, abstracted from the syntax and meaning, reveal metrical structures. Regarding post-1850 verse, several linguistic phenomena are in favor of a 6-6 meter in lines in which a word runs over the caesura as in Pas de ces familiarités, je vous prie.

Unendowed of rhythmic cells such as feet, French verse has no smaller metric units than hemistichs. The way these are combined within sequences of superior length (lines of verse, couplets) is studied using an original method founded on probabilistic properties of random chains.

Written within a neo-jakobsonian framework, this paper provides the reader with a survey of metrical typology that focuses on accentual and quantitative metrics. The hexameter verse of ancient Greek and Latin Poetry, and the accentual 10-syllable verse of Modern languages, are studied in some detail.

This article is an attempt to provide some new insights in the analysis of Classical Arabic metrics and to bring to light some arguments against al-Xalîl's theory of circles, by eliminating one of its fundamental elements, the minimal unit (watid mafrûq, <- >). This theory prevented from discovering important generalizations, which imply the reorganization of the metrical system.

This essay examines the rhyme-system of 16th century French as presented by Lanoue (1596) in his rhyming dictionary — certainly the most precise and extensive rhyming dictionary in the history of French — and how it evolved from a strictly phonetic system into the « classical rhyme », a system depending more and more heavily on stereotyped interpretations of a stabilizing conventional spelling, as poets tried to maintain distinctions no longer existing in the language.