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Language change and poetic options

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

D. Gary Miller
D. Gary Miller*
Affiliation:
University of Florida
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Abstract

This paper supports a hypothesis that poetic ‘options’ (at least on the phonological plane) are of the same types as language changes—i.e., that ‘poetic license’ consists of the relaxation, re-ordering, generalization, inversion etc. of rules of the natural language to yield metrically relevant representations that may differ considerably from outputs in the spoken language. The issue of when to measure metrical, rhythmic, or linguistic complexity is discussed, and a case is made for measuring linguistic complexity in the examples presented here.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , March 1977 , pp. 21 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 by Linguistic Society of America

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