University of Bamberg Studies in English Linguistics – serie

This book attempts to build a complete theory of stress in Old English. In particular, the author tries to elucidate the relation, in that language, between stress placement and syllable weight. Eventually, he finds that the syllable should be abandoned as the central notion of Old English metrical phonology and replaced with the mora as an independent unit of phonological quantity. These findings are then applied to a new, phonologically-based analysis of the rhythm of Old English poetry.