Prosodic realisation of enjambment in recitations of German poetry

Abstract

A salient feature of poetry is the organisation in lines and stanzas. Versification thus serves as a structural (and aesthetic) layer that either conforms to syntactic units or breaks them up. If line breaks disrupt syntactic units, we speak of enjambment - the line suggests a pause while the syntactic information continues. Since prosodic boundaries typically reflect syntactic boundaries, the question is which information is marked - the line or the syntactic unit. In a preliminary study with one professional speaker of German, we investigate how line breaks are prosodically realised in recitations of twenty poems by Friedrich Hölderlin. We compare cases of enjambment to line breaks without enjambment and look at lengthening of the line-final segment, frequency and duration of pauses and F 0 reset across the line break, which are typical cues used for the prosodic marking of phrase boundaries in speech. We found that while pauses and F 0 reset are tuned down in cases of enjambment, the line break is still prosodically marked by means of final lengthening. This preliminary result supports the idea that a speaker can convey both the syntactic continuity as well as the versification of the poem by strengthening different cues.