---
title: "Crossing the Borders between Meter, Syntax and Information"
description: "She presents two case studies. 51 references. Among them: 1."
authors: ["Chiara De Bastiani"]
year: 2023
venue: "Lea 12"
source: "https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/bsfm-lea/article/view/14488"
doi: "10.36253/lea-1824-484x-14488"
licence: "CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Lea)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/bastiani-2023-crossing-borders-between-meter-syntax/"
---
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# Crossing the Borders between Meter, Syntax and Information Structure. Some Methodological Notes

**Authors:** [Chiara De Bastiani](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/chiara-de-bastiani/) · **Year:** 2023 · **Venue:** [Lea 12](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/lea-lingue-e-letterature-d-oriente-e-d-occidente/) ([LEA - Lingue e Letterature d Oriente e d Occidente 2023](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/lea-lingue-e-letterature-d-oriente-e-d-occidente/2023/)) · **Publisher:** [Firenze University Press](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/firenze-university-press/) · **Licence:** [CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Lea)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.36253/lea-1824-484x-14488) · [PDF](https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/bsfm-lea/article/download/14488/13681) · [DOI 10.36253/lea-1824-484x-14488](https://doi.org/10.36253/lea-1824-484x-14488) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4390142081)

**Citations:** 1 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
The paper asks how poetic historical texts, often set aside as unreliable "bad data" for syntax, can still serve as evidence about older English. De Bastiani argues that combining the analysis of meter with syntax and information structure makes such texts usable. She presents two case studies. The first is the Early Middle English *Ormulum*. Its sentences, extracted with the standard methods for studying OV/VO change, show word-order variation similar to contemporary prose. Closer analysis shows that the meter strongly steers which of the grammatically possible orders the author picks. The second is the Old English *Beowulf*, where object pronouns placed before semi-auxiliaries are examined against verse structure. Topical, given pronouns tend to sit in unstressed dips, while the new material that follows falls on alliterating positions. Pronouns that carry contrast or a change of referent appear on stressed lifts. Because prose offers no direct cue to prominence, meter becomes indirect evidence for links between prosody and information structure. This sharpens how both philologists and syntacticians can treat verse.

## Key points
- Two texts are studied. The first is the *Ormulum* (c. 1160–1180, MS Junius I, North-East Midlands dialect, important for the OV→VO shift). The second is *Beowulf* (3182 alliterating lines, single manuscript Cotton Vitellius A XV, 10th century).
- The *Ormulum* has 15-syllable long lines, each split by a caesura into an 8-syllable and a 7-syllable verse with a strict weak–strong alternation.
- In the *Ormulum*, swapping constituent order would usually break the metrical scheme or the words' natural stress. Pre- or post-verbal object pronoun placement looks chosen to fit the meter.
- In *Beowulf*, pronouns preceding the semi-auxiliary mostly refer to the passage topic. They fit a topic domain that maps onto weak positions and a focus domain that maps onto prominent ones.
- In both texts, pronouns marking contrast or a shift in reference (e.g., addressing the audience) land on strong or stressed positions.

## Interesting ideas
- Before treating a surface word order as linguistic evidence, check whether an external, non-grammatical constraint (here meter) could have forced that choice. Such constraints can make a text look typical while its variation is actually caused by something else.
- Positional prominence serves as a proxy for information status: given or topical material sits in weak slots, while new or contrastive material sits in strong ones. Placement can thus reveal discourse roles that are not marked explicitly.
- The author tests each attested order by mentally inverting the constituents and asking whether the result still satisfies all constraints. This is a cheap counterfactual test of what actually drove a choice.
- Given-before-new ordering appears as a stable tendency in early Germanic texts, with the topic placed early and the new content after it.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (learn): Tag silver training data by genre or form (verse, fables, headlines) and check whether a parser's agreement or error patterns shift with it, so that form-driven word orders do not skew training.
- **I2** (frames): Use a pronoun's unusual or prominent placement (fronting, clause-final stress position) as a feature for detecting contrast or a change of referent in coreference and topic tracking.
- **I3** (learn): Build negative controls by permuting constituents and checking whether a rule or model prediction still holds, which shows whether it relies on order or on real structure.
- **I4** (back): When generating text from the meaning graph, order constituents so that already-introduced entities come first and new information comes last, making the output read more naturally.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [Ca' Foscari University of Venice](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/ca-foscari-university-of-venice/) — University, Venice, Italy · 12 works · 328 citations

📚 Shelves (2): [🎭 Arts and Humanities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · 16,039 works · [🗣️ Language and Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · 15,891 works

🧭 Topics (1): [📐 Syntax & grammar formalisms](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/syntax-grammar/) · 214 works

## Cite

Cite as: Chiara De Bastiani. 2023. Crossing the Borders between Meter, Syntax and Information Structure. Some Methodological Notes. Lea 12.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{bastiani2023crossing,
  title = {{Crossing the Borders between Meter, Syntax and Information Structure. Some Methodological Notes}},
  author = {Chiara {De Bastiani}},
  booktitle = {Lea 12},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.36253/lea-1824-484x-14488},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.36253/lea-1824-484x-14488}
}
```

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## References

51 references, 2 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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