This article is a study of the metrics of sung and chanted verse, based on a data corpus of 670 English folksong lines, as well as chanted renditions of the corpus by ten native speaker consultants. Our theoretical focus is on the role of phonological phrasing in metrics. We find that in sung and chanted verse, an especially tight correspondence to the metrical pattern is imposed on linguistic material that is either bounded within a tight phrasal domain or located at the right edge of a high-level domain. These patterns have been observed earlier for spoken verse. But for the phenomenon of metrical inversion, the behavior of sung and chanted verse is quite different from spoken verse. We develop an explanation of the difference, based on the idea that inversion in sung and chanted verse occurs only in those cases where it is the best available metrical option. A further finding is that sung and chanted verse tends to match the number of beats alloted to a syllable to that syllable's natural linguistic duration. We suggest that the relevant measure of duration is phonetic, not phonological; and that the tendency to phonetic duration matching in sung and chanted verse has a categorial, phonologized analogue in the phenomenon of spoken-verse Resolution. 1 An anonymous reviewer made a number of very thoughtful suggestions for improving this article. We would

This paper aims at demonstrating that the cognitive mechanisms underlying certain tropes (e.g. metaphor or metonymy) may assume variable degrees of conventionalisation, thereby giving rise to a range of phenomena along either side of the semantics/ pragmatics distinction. Examining specifically cases of metonymy, I propose a pragmatic account of creative, one-off metonymic expressions using the framework of relevance theory; my main argument is that metonymy is a variety of the interpretive use of language. I further look at degrees of conventionalisation that a given metonymy may go through until it becomes fully semanticised, thus bringing about semantic change. My discussion should have farreaching implications for lexical semantics and the relevance-theoretic distinction between descriptive and interpretive use.

This article proposes a new interpretation of the relationship between poetic form and literary interpretation in Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, focusing on the special affordances of rhyme and meter in dramatic verse and on Rostand’s virtuosic exploitation of poetic blending possibilities in Cyrano. I claim that poetic blends play a thematically essential role in this work, at a level far beyond their thematic contribution to most verse drama. Such a reading of Cyrano may thus help to expose general aspects of poetic blending which may be less visibly present in other texts. It also has consequences for our understanding of verbal humor and irony. In the final section of the article, I propose an extension of my analysis of metric and rhyming blends to the beginnings of a cognitive poetic treatment of intertextuality as blending.