Terms such as p., rest, unrealized beat, implied offbeat, silent stress, and hold have a confused history in prosody because (1) they are used inconsistently to refer to two quite distinct phenomena, one linguistic, the other metrical, and because (2) one major group of metrical theorists, those who scan by syllables and stresses rather than by measuring timing, usually deny that the metrical p. actually exists in meter per se, assigning it instead to the corollary domain of “performance” (q.v.). Everyone agrees on the normal linguistic p., determined by syntax and rhet.; ps. or junctures of varying durations are an essential component of speech, and since they are very imperfectly captured in orthography by punctuation (q.v.), linguists have devised several systems for more exact transcription. The question is whether a unit of time can replace a missing syllable or syllables in a metrical structure. This narrow question is the key to understanding one of the central disputes in metrical theory, that between the “timers” and “stressers.”
A metrical p. can coincide with a syntactic p.:
Pull off my boots: harder, harder: so.
But a metrical p., in temporal analyses, may also occur where we do not normally think of ps. occurring:
As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie
Recent phonological studies have confirmed what timers such as Coventry Patmore and Egerton Smith always maintained—that two adjacent stresses, even in prose, require either a separating beat or subordination of one of the stresses (Liberman and Prince; Selkirk).
If one accepts the existence of these two kinds of p., terminology might usefully be divided as follows: the metrical element is a metrical p., a rest, or an unrealized beat, the syntactic and rhetorical element a juncture, caesura, or extrametrical p. Silence is probably misleading for both types of p., because no metrist insists on a complete absence of phonation after a preceding syllable for either type, and no one wants to specify as a relevant feature the point at which phonation stops. Some temporal analyses also hold that a p. can replace a stressed syllable, but this substitution is much rarer than that of a p. for an unstressed syllable.
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