The case study is Renaissance metre and its implementation in a set of Romance and West-Germanic languages.

The interaction between phonology and metrics is explored from two perspectives: one looks at poetic aspects as evidence for phonological characteristics the other explores to what extent phonology conditions the development of poetic tradition and by what means the metrical template is filled by phonological material. This dissertation investigates the interface between phonological and metrical structure. I propose a quantitative approach to test and compare th. According to the literature, the main Romance forms can be divided into three groups in this respect: 1) purely syllabic poetry of the French tradition, 2) a meter tending towards iambic rhythm of Italian and Spanish endecasyllable (Nespor–Vogel 1986 Piera 1981 Gasparov 1987) and 3) the one tending towards syllabicity of Catalan and Portuguese decasyllable (Duffell 1994 Spaggiari 2003, respectively). A significant aspect of divergence among the poetic forms is related to their tendency towards an iambic rhythm. The aim of this paper is to make a typology of the Romance instantiations of Renaissance meter and to analyse the elements characterising metrical variation. Every poetic tradition adapted it in its own way and, even within Romance languages, the resulting new poetic forms varied considerably from each other.

During the Renaissance, a new meter spread across Europe and imposed itself as the main way of versification.

Espiritu de mical