ON THE PROSE RHYTHM OF EVERYDAY SPEECH (A prozai beszed ritmusarol)

Most studies on prose rhythm deal with issues concerning the rhythmicity of artistic/rhetorical prose as part of the rhythmics of poetry and/or literary prose. However, the domain of inquiry into linguistic rhythm also includes the rhythm of everyday speech, or 'speech rhythm' for short. Speech rhythm includes, albeit not in the same artistic order and not with the same degree of expressivity, all components whose regular recurrence makes a poem a poem: articulatory rhythm, based on the alternating durations of syllables including short vs. long vowels; stress-based rhythm, produced by the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables, words, or roughly isochronous stretches of speech containing more or less material; structural rhythm, based on the alternation of sentences with parallel structure; and overall text rhythm that comes from the proportions of various constituents within the structure of the text.