Abstract
Metrical patterns in versification and poetic craftsmanship have always constituted an invaluable source for linguistics. In fact, from a historical standpoint, some of the main developments in the field (Prague Phonology, major discoveries in the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-‐‑European languages, leading, for instance, to laryngeal theory, or the establishment of phrasing in Homer, to just name a few) can be traced back to metrical research. Furthermore, the use of metrical arguments has played a major role in text criticism and fixation, most notably in the likes of Karl Lachmann and Paul Maas. Unfortunately, with the collapse of tradition in many of our academic institutions (notably, universities) the use of such tools has become an oddity. As a result, many scholars end up being oblivious to the fact that techniques can only be surpassed in their own internal terms, that is, by being substituted by more accurate, efficient and sophisticated means of achieving the old goal. No longer pursuing a goal within a discipline can by no means be taken as evidence for the intellectual superiority of the new modus
operandi, but rather as a signal of negligence. It is a major goal of this work to help avoid such negligence.
The present paper seeks to explore the relations between metrical architecture and problems of philological transmission and reconstruction in a thorough way, and to shed new light on the classical logic of argumentation within our field, showing how the use of the newest analytical tools in the study of verse or elsewhere is not incompatible with well-‐‑ established facts and discoveries of a long-‐‑ existing tradition of studies in text transmission through the ages. In order to achieve that goal, we will resort to evidence drawn from Camões’s Os Lusíadas, thereby trying to prove how it is possible to disambiguate structures with twofold semantic interpretation (and, therefore, with various alternatives regarding prosodic phrasing), thanks to the metrical criteria requited by Portuguese decasyllable.
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