Home › Glossary › Letter M

minimal prosody

Meter
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

The reduction of prosodic features to their sparsest minimal form

Detailed Definition
Minimal prosody focuses on the subtlest rhythmic and sonic patterns in poetry—micro-stresses, vowel shifts, breath units—rather than strict metrical feet; this approach, common in free verse, treats prosody as organic and perceptual rather than rule-bound.
Example
Example in poetry:
Focusing only on the use of stress and unstressed syllables without considering rhyme or other acoustic features; The analysis of meter that only looks at the binary pattern of stressed (/) and unstressed (u) syllables, ignoring pitch, volume, or duration; A system of scansion that only marks the metrical feet and their number, e.g., iambic pentameter, without additional annotations; The bare minimum of structure that defines a line as having some rhythm, however loose or irregular.
Additional Notes
The smallest possible use of rhythm, stress, or meter, often bordering on prose, used to deliberately flatten the cadence or to highlight the significance of subtle shifts in language.
Also Known As
Spare prosody stripped prosody minimal metre
Skip to main content