“headless,” said of lines of verse, namely that they are missing an initial syllable ( Ger. fehlende Auftakt, “suppression of the anacrusis”). Though it is undeniable that in some runs of regular accentual-syllabic verse occasional lines will be found that are simply missing their first syllables, whether from design or defect of textual transmission, the claims that have most often been made about the concept of acephaly have been made on more sweeping grounds, involving metrical phenomena which are, in fact, capable of varying interpretation. It used to be held, for example, that there are some eight or nine a. lines in Chaucer, including—depending on how one treats final -e, hence how one scans—the first line of the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales. It was also claimed that a missing first syllable changes rising rhythm to falling (q.v.)—so Schipper. Many temporal and musical theories of meter are congenial to the notion of a. lines as important variants rather than simply defects, but such theories are not now widely accepted. If, however, acephaly, as fore-clipping, is disputed, the converse phenomenon, catalexis (q.v.), the cutting off of final syllables, is very well attested; but this may in fact be unrelated.
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