American Anthropologist 68, 1418-41. Feb. 22 Tsur, Reuven. 1983. Papers in Cognitive Poetics 1. Tel Aviv University. A linguistic approach to meter treats a verse form as consisting of a set of rules or constraints which constrain some aspect of the prosodic phonological structure of the lines of that verse form.
Different meters regulate different aspects of prosody, such as stress, length, or tone.
There is often a significant degree of rhythmic variation between lines of a genre, such as iambic pentameter in English verse. Generative Meter has a particular take on this. This perspective means that the meter is characterized as a more abstract pattern, from which we generate all surface variation in line types. Two, it allows us to investigate cognitive aspects of phonology in a specific domain. The study of rhythmic patternings in conscious usage is especially useful with the growing intersection between linguistics and cognitive science.