Post

Enjoyed my week of Fable. Projects Claude and I've worked on, updates since 2026: 1. Prosodic (metrical scansion machine), 2009– 15x faster, can use GPU, finds foot boundaries, has Liberman&Prince stress trees & grids, MaxEnt constraint weighting, + more. prosodic.app github.com/quadrismegis...

yblent.bsky.social

@yblent.bsky.social

12 July

Quick question: what’s Liberman&Prince? Assuming it’s generative metrics of some kind but I’m only familiar with Halle, Keyser, Kiparsky

yblent.bsky.social

@yblent.bsky.social

12 July

Asking because I’ve never understood how the tree diagrams work—always seems like a judgement call to select stress maxima

Ryan Heuser

@ryanheuser.com

It's from their brilliant paper here, "On Stress and Linguistic Rhythm" (1975): www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/4... They argue stress is relational all the way down, syntax to syllable, and demonstrate it pretty convincingly.

12/7/26, 5:26 pm0 reposts2 likes

yblent.bsky.social

@yblent.bsky.social

12 July

Assuming this is a me problem but I have literally never been able to hear a stress maximum.

Ryan Heuser

@ryanheuser.com

12 July

This is what's funny about the whole field, especially prose rhythm: stress is so much more determined by what a speaker chooses to focus than it is by a theory of syntax. I tried mapping prosodic's stress predictions onto a spoken corpus and it just doesn't work, I think for that reason.

yblent.bsky.social

@yblent.bsky.social

12 July

Thanks!