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An investigation into the metrical structure of "Paradise Lost". Brown, Allan Gordon

Abstract

This is a preliminary investigation of the empirical and formal conditions necessary to provide a full description of the metrical structure of Paradise Lost. My study is immediately concerned with the scansion of a corpus of 2018 lines of the poem. The centre of the study is the specification of a generative model set to provide structural descriptions, i.e., scansions. Some anomalies of this model are considered in the final chapter. A scansion is recorded for each line in the corpus. I provide an impressionistic survey of lexical and syntactic phenomena in the corpus, an analysis of equivalence-substitution metrical analysis, a taxonomy of elision by apocope in the corpus, a brief investigation of elision by syncope and a speculative analysis of caesura.

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