Scansion - Common 2- 3- and 4-level Notations - 4-level Notations

4-level Notations

4-level scansion is generally a sign of a more linguistically oriented prosodist at work. Otto Jespersen introduced his numeric notation in 1900 (in Danish; English translation in 1933). He occasionally added a 5th level, indicating a fully stressed syllable further emphasized by phrasal stress. In 1951 Trager & Smith posited 4 phonemic levels of stress in English. This was in a broad linguistic context, not specifically pertaining to verse; nevertheless, in the 1950s and 1960s linguistically oriented prosodists (such as John Thompson, Harold Whitehall, and Seymour Chatman) attempted to use these 4 levels of stress to formulate a fuller explanation of meter. Chomsky & Halle's work did not specifically address verse, but their notation of stress (effectively, Jespersen's turned upside-down) was also influential; Chomsky & Halle posited more than 4 levels of stress, but typically only 4 are used in scansion.

Jespersen	Trager-Smith	Chomsky-Halle	Wimsatt-Beardsley	Notes
4	/	1	///	Strongest stress (typically ictic)
3	^	2	//	Secondary stress
2	\	3	/	Tertiary stress
1	˘	4		Least stress (typically nonictic)

In addition to 4 levels of stress, Trager & Smith posited 4 levels of pitch, and 4 levels of juncture (basically the smoothness of transition between syllables). All 3 suprasegmentals have been used by prosodists to map out lines of verse; this comes about as close to C.S. Lewis's "all the phonetic facts" as possible, and constitutes (as Chatman makes explicit), neither the meter nor even the "phonetic facts" of the text, but a transcription of one reading of the text. Here superscript numererals indicate pitch, and "|" and "#" indicate juncture.

˘ ˘ / ˘ ˘ ^ ˘ ^ ˘ / ˘ / ²There was ³never a sound²|²beside the wood²|²but ³one#

Jespersen was not the first to use numerals to mark stress, Alexander John Ellis used them (starting with 0 for least stress) as early as 1873. Nor were W.K. Wimsatt & Monroe Beardsley the first to use multiple slashes: none other than Thomas Jefferson used a 5-level notational system of accents ("////" for strongest stress, down to "/" for little stress, and no mark for "no" stress).

Steele and McAuley have used Jespersen's 4-level notation as a secondary method. Wimsatt, Woods, and The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics have used Chomsky & Halle's notation as a secondary method.

One of the primary virtues of 4-level scansion is that it helps clarify a surprisingly specific—and surprisingly controversial—debate. Take the rhythmically complex line:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

Some prosodists hear "-ions of sweet si-" as a very light iamb, followed by a very heavy iamb, yielding a 2-level metrical scansion of:

/ × × / × / × / × / When to the sess | ions of sweet si | lent thought

("Foot" markers are used here merely to emphasize the syllables in question. Recall that this metrical scansion does not imply that "of" is necessarily spoken with more emphasis than "sweet", only that these fill ictic and nonictic positions, respectively.)

However, other prosodists hold that, just as the usual 2nd position ictus has been switched to 1st position, so the usual 6th position ictus has been switched to 7th, yielding:

/ × × / × × / / × / When to the sess | ions of sweet si | lent thought

In this case, "-ions of sweet si-" is sometimes taken as a pyrrhic foot followed by a spondee, and sometimes as a single 4-syllable unit (a minor or rising ionic) that replaces 2 iambic feet. This is a case in which 2-level scansion is felt to miss something essential even by some rather strict prosodists. In fact, Groves has shown that in cases like this, where the ictus moves forward (as opposed to backward as in "When to") each of the 4 positions in question has slightly different constraints that must be fulfilled for the line to be perceived as metrical. In layman's terms, these constraints are most often realized as 4 rising positions; in Jespersen's notation:

3 2 1 4 1 2 3 4 1 4 When to the sess | ions of sweet si | lent thought

In this case, everyone is somewhat right: the 4 positions are like a light then a heavy iamb, and like a pyrric followed by a spondee, and like a 4-syllable "ascending foot" that functions as a unit.