Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 October 2008
There is currently no generally accepted theory of metre in French such as the one available for English. Students of French verse-texts look to linguists in vain for a clear decision-procedure for the metrical description of French verse. This essay attempts to derive such a decision-procedure from a historical testing of the hypothesis that the word in French has a prosodic identity and that metre in French can be seen as a structure which orders that identity.