The role of pitch accent in Vedic Sanskrit poetics

Vedic meter, being quantitative, is generally assumed to ignore the language’s lexically distinctive pitch accent. Nevertheless, beyond the obvious absence of any strict requirements, possible preferential interactions between meter and accent have remained unexplored. This article presents a series of word shape- and category-controlled tests, all of which support the conventional wisdom: accent plays no systematic role in meter. (While I do discover an effect of tonal NonFinality , it is not confined to meter.) Moreover, beyond meter, I find no support for other possible roles of accent in poetry, such as responsion, formularity, clash, lapse, or strictness modulation. This work bears on poetic typology (specifically, how prosodic features interact in metrics), on the realization of the Vedic accent as tone vs. stress-and-tone, and on (mixed model and Monte Carlo) methodologies for corpus prosody.