Estructura del vers i variació lingüística en els poemes d’Ausiàs March

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to show how different aspects of the meter such as the syllable count, the rhyme and the rhythmic patterns, can be used to obtain information about the linguistic variation from other periods. The study analyzes certain formal variants in the poems of Ausiàs March (1397–1459) which serve to meet the metric requirements of the line. Regarding the syllable count, we have focused on the variable treatment, as hiatuses or as diphthongs, of vowel sequences with decreasing sonority: despite the overwhelming majority of hiatuses, the data suggest that some current constraints were already active at that time, such as the tendency to avoid diphthongs in vowel sequences close to the main stress. On the other hand, rhyme and rhythm often orientate us on the appropriate pronunciation and spelling for some dubious words, such as the quality of mid vowels or the stress location in doublets like ésser/esser ‘to be’. Finally, the analysis of rhythm reveals the need of a certain relativity in the concept of tonicity, based on the behavior of rhythmically ambiguous elements, including the relative què ‘which’. In this case, though, the information also flows in the other direction, from the language to the meter, since the distribution of ambiguous elements, with a clear tendency to gravitate toward low-prominence positions, helps us to apprehend the prominence relationships among the different parts of the verse.