Sephardic Scansion and Phonological Theory

In the Hebrew poetry of medieval Spain the conjunction u- 'and' is metrically anomalous, scanning sometimes as long and sometimes as short. Malone (1983) argued that, although the behavior of u- is irregular if it is examined in concrete, phonetic terms, it falls in with the general metrical pattern of Sephardic poetry if analyzed at a more abstract level of phonological representation. Malone's treatment of Sephardic Hebrew, along with similarly abstract treatments by several scholars of poetic meter in a variety of other languages, forms part of the case for the psychological reality of abstract phonology: if poets could make use of abstract phonology, then it is in some sense real and not merely an artifact of linguists' analysis. This paper seeks to refute Malone's abstract analysis of Sephardic meter by showing that different explanations for the same observations, of concrete rather than abstract nature, are conceivable. Furthermore, documentary evidence confirms one of our hypothetical explanations. It follows that the Sephardic case does not provide support for the claim that poets have intuitive access to abstract phonology

Linguistics · Historical and Linguistic Studies · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · History · Language, Linguistics, Cultural Analysis · Philosophy

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