Nigel Fabb is Professor of Literary Linguistics in the Department of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde. His recent publications include Sentence Structure Second Edition (2005) and Language and Literary Structure (Cambridge, 2002). Morris Halle is Institute Professor Emeritus in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His recent publications include The Sound Pattern of English (with N. Chomsky, 1991) and From Memory to Speech and Back (2002).

• 1. A theory of poetic meter; 2. English strict meters; 3. English loose meters; 4. Southern Romance Carlos Piera; 5. French; 6. Greek; 7. Classical Arabic; 8. Sanskrit; 9. Latvian; 10. Meters of the world; 11. The metrical poetry of the Old Testament.

'… extremely impressive … the authors have laid out an interesting and fairly explicit proposal for how metrical poetry works and have demonstrated the power of this theory with a truly impressive array of facts. Anyone seriously interested in the linguistic analysis of meter really needs to read this book.' Journal of Linguistics