Stanzaic prosody of ritual songs detects both synchronous as well as polymorphic or bistructural correlations of the two song components – poetic text and tune. Tune often has its own actual segmentation (which does not match the text) and its own syntagmatics. Therefore, the verse-quantitative (according to number of verses in the strophe) classification of song forms accepted so far in musical folklore is unproductive and slightly informative. Paradigmatics of melodious forms is more complex and diverse. The same poetic text in tunes of various internal architectonics has different tension, euphony and semantics. This article discusses four of them: 1) repeating, 2) reprise-symmetrical forms, 3) polymorphic forms based on bistructural properties (opposition) of text/tune, 4) implicative forms, variations of question-and-reciprocal ones. Each of the structural-compositional paradigms has its spatial distribution (areal) and is located in the chronological order of forms.
Following on from work by Miloš Sedmidubský, this study deals with syllabic irregularity (heterogeneity) in Toman’s (and Vrchlický’s) verse. It focuses on Toman’s early work, analysing individual poems and collections (particularly Pohádky krve, Tales of Blood, 1898 and Torzo života, Torso of Life, 1902). The material base is made up of 350 poems, and the differences between individual sets are checked by means of statistical tests. Syllabic irregularity is expressed in terms of entropy.
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