Description of dataset: Data containing phonologically transcribed forms from two Old French texts, the Life of St. Alexis (AlexisRaM) and the Song of Roland (RolMoign) which form the basis of the analysis in the accompanying paper. Forms, lemmas and morphosyntactic tags were extracted from the Base de français médiéval (http://txm.bfm-corpus.org/). All remaining annotation was semi-automatically added by the author. The scripts used to generate the phonological transcriptions are still under active development and are available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/syllabic-verse-analysis/.

Abstract of related publication: This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the phonotactics of syllable rhymes based on all unique tokens in two Early Old French texts. Based on the data from this single, conservative variety, I develop Jacobs’ (1994) proposal that the Old French stress rule is underlyingly trochaic and that word-final stress is caused by the presence of an empty-headed final syllable. I argue that this analysis can only be valid while words with final stress systematically end in a consonant that can, and often must, be parsed as the onset to an empty-headed syllable. Although this is not the case in most later varieties of Old French, the prediction is borne out by our data. I conclude by examining the implications of this analysis for the accentuation and phonotactics of monosyllables and for the study of prosodic change Old French.

Modern editions of two early 12th-century manuscripts, both reproducing the original manuscript with a minimum of editorial intervention.