The Caesura in Slovene and Serbo-Croatian Verse

Abstract

In syllabic and syllabotonic verse caesura (a concept narrower that the concept of "bipartition of verse") is a consistent break between words that follows the same syllable in a verse. It often coincides with a break between stress units. Syntactic boundaries within a verse fall more often on caesura than on other parts of the verse. Hence a caesura is not a pause. No other constant feature is obligatory for caesura, e.g., zeugma or tone constant before caesura, etc., are possible, but not obligatory parallel phenomena.