Syntax

After prosodies, the second big subsystem is the syntactic one. Any serious metrical analysis cannot do without words classification: as for any language, we must distinguish between the purely graphical notion of word and its linguistic reality. For instance, nobody would ever extract as full “words” appositives like “a”, “in”, “the” from the sentence “a dog barks in the house”: here the true words are rather “a dog”, “barks” and “in the house”, and we thus have only 2 true wordends. As for metrics, this means that not only word types define true and false (i.e. purely graphical) wordends, but that several phenomena (e.g. accent, elision, sentence position, etc.) are strictly related to them.

Thus, for Greek we deal with words classification by distinguishing among the so-called lexical words (the “full” semantic words) and the crucial class of appositives, which usually have higher textual frequency and a very small size. They in turn include words with and without accent (clitics), which finally part into enclitics and proclitics according to their connection to the left or the right.

The syntactic subsystem uses very complex syntagmatic algorithms to take into account all the surface changes of these words and detect their nature. It takes all the data about appositives from a relational database, and it enables the metrical subsystem to deal with some 16 types of wordends, as defined by the combination of 4 factors (true or false -i.e. merely graphical- wordend, presence of hiatus between words, presence of aspiration in hiatus, presence of elision in hiatus: you can test these differences online by querying the sample database here). All its data are stored as usual in the data layers linked to the text segments.

A trivial sample is enough to show how different are the results when we apply this linguistical analysis. Here are two charts showing the distribution of purely graphical wordends (top) and the distribution of 'true' wordends (bottom) in the sample hexametric text for this site (Aratus Phaenomena):

As you can see, we have peaks in the locations corresponding to the main caesurae, but they look very uneven (e.g. the trithemimeres is even higher than the much more important penthemimeres!), and we even find peaks in unexpected positions. Also the most severe bridges like Lehrs and Hermann show an unexpectedly high number of violations. If instead we take into account only ‘true’ wordends (right) everything changes. Here you can clearly see that we have the expected balance among the different caesurae, and even the bridges correspond to much deeper valleys. So the syntactic stage is really crucial for a correct metrical analysis.