Homeric enjambment (and Caesura): A functional-cognitive approach

In Homeric epic, approximately half of the grammatical sentences do not stop at verse end but run over into the next line, a phenomenon commonly referred to as enjambment. Scholars such as Parry, Kirk and Higbie have proposed various typologies of enjambment crucially based on the criterion of whether the syntactic unit is completed at verse end or not. This chapter approaches enjambment in terms of its functional and cognitive linguistic properties. Enjambments are considered as boundaries between Intonation Units, which are by default expressions of Discourse Acts. This approach leads to a new typology of Homeric enjambment, on the basis of which it can be argued that verse end not only constitutes a metrical boundary, but also coincides with a functional-cognitive boundary. A brief application of the proposed typology based on functional and cognitive principles suggests that the typology is also able to analyze verse-internal caesura positions and their discourse-pragmatic functions.