Hypermetrical Irregularities in Compound Phrases

The chapter is devoted to hypermetrical irregularities caused by techniques of phrase linkage, including overlap and elision. It traces the historical pedigree of these concepts and compares their use by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff (1983) to that by William Rothstein (1989). It supplements the concepts of left and right elision, distinguished by the former authors, with the concepts of left and right deletion. It then concentrates on phrase linkages that occur at formal junctures marked by cadences and it presents a classification of all hypermetric scenarios at such junctures. In the final part it evaluates the concept of “shadow hypermeter.”