What is a Line of Verse?
Nigel Fabb
Abstract for plenary talk at ESSE 9Some literary texts (called 'verse') are cut into sections called 'lines'. In each type of verse in each tradition, specific criteria define a line as well-formed. Among the criteria are: the line must be in a particular meter, or end on a rhyme, or have a line-internal rhyme, or have an alliteration pattern, or end at the end of a word, or at the end of a phrase, or at the end of a sentence, or have internal parallelism, or be parallel to an adjacent line, or have a word boundary at a specific place within the line, and so on.
The criteria for defining a line usually refer to the language of the line, but lines are not themselves linguistic constituents. Since lines seem to be found in all literatures (whether oral or written), we might therefore want to formulate a universally relevant answer to the question 'what is a line of verse?'. We immediately face the difficulty that no single criterion is always found: if for example we compare English sonnets and Greek lyric verse, we find that lines have no characteristics in common. Instead, we must look at higher-level characteristics of lines, to understand what lines are. These include the significance of line-beginning, line-end, and of (usually just) one line-internal position; the fact that lines often combine words and phrases in ways which appear to violate syntactic combinatorial, movement and ellipsis rules; the independent and in some ways isolated status of adjacent lines; and the fact that characteristics of lineation are often divided up between a shorter line and a longer superline (such as a period, or couplet).