Prosodic Scansion

Prosodic Scansion is the formal examination of speech as it is delivered within the Tower, distinguished from ordinary transcription by its attention not to what is said but to how it falls. A scansion records stress, syllable weight, pause, and the interval between breath and utterance; it does not record meaning, and a scansion that resolves into a legible sentence is returned to the officiant unscored. The practice is administered under the Seven Permissible Syllable Laws and is the working method on which the Acoustical Cartographers' Guild has built its reputation, most notably in the long dispute over the catalyst of Rumour Cisterns.

Method

Scansion is taken at the aperture, not at the desk. The officiant stands within hearing of the subject — a petitioner, a witness, a stairwell porter reciting a floor inventory — and marks the utterance in a field hand of six columns: stress, weight, pause, cadence, deviation, and a sixth column left blank for the use of the reviewing Librarian, which is almost never filled and which no officiant is permitted to query.

Cadence is measured in beats against the local stair-tread, which is nominally uniform but is not. Since the resurvey of the Western Spiral in the winter of 1402, officiants have been required to note the tread number at which a scansion is taken, and to repeat the scansion at the corresponding tread of the opposite spiral if the result is to be cited in any proceeding. The requirement is widely resented and universally observed.

The Dactylic-Spondee Question

The central controversy of the discipline concerns rhythm of the kind that precedes alteration. The Acoustical Cartographers' Guild holds that the catalyst for Rumour Cisterns is prosodic, and identifies it with a dactylic-spondee figure — a falling triplet followed by two heavy beats — occurring in the speech of a petitioner within nine paces of standing water. The Reality Cartographers' Guild disputes this, holding the catalyst to be semantic, and has twice refused to countersign the Acoustical returns on the ground that a rhythm cannot carry a meaning it does not contain.

The dispute has a procedural history. Under Annex 6 of the Fifth Concordance, a scansion offered as evidence must be corroborated by a second officiant standing at the opposite aperture; Annex 9 of the same document requires that the two officiants be of different schools, which the Third Concordance forbids at Annex 2 on the ground that disagreement at the aperture contaminates the record. Both annexes remain in force. In practice the officiants are drawn from the same school and the corroboration is entered as unanimous, a compromise described by the Clerk of the Eastern Aperture, Halvard Reeth, as "the only reading of the Concordances that does not require us to stop working."

"A scansion is not an opinion about the words. It is a measurement of the air the words were carried in. Where the two disagree, measure the air again."

— Acoustical Cartographers' Guild, Standing Instruction 3

The Seven Laws in Practice

Compliance with the Seven Permissible Syllable Laws is checked at scansion rather than at composition, which places the officiant in the position of enforcing a regulation against speakers who have not read it. The Second Law, governing terminal weight, is the most frequently breached; the Fourth, concerning the admissibility of a syllable under stress, is the most frequently disputed. The Dialogical School maintains that the Laws describe rather than constrain, and that a scansion recording a breach is simply a scansion of a different utterance — a position the Intentionalist School rejects as "a licence to score nothing and call it a finding" (Intentionalist School, Reply to the Dialogists, 1388).

The Functionalist School takes no position on the Laws and scores only what alters a listener's conduct, on the reasoning that a rhythm which changes nothing has not occurred. Its returns are consequently shorter than anyone else's and are filed in a separate drawer.

Objections and Adjustments

Three standing objections are entered against any scansion before it is admitted:

• that the subject was aware of being scanned, and altered their delivery accordingly;
• that the officiant's own breath fell within the measured interval;
• that the floor had been renumbered since the scansion was taken.

The third is the most common and the least often resolved. Floor numbers are not sequential in any way anyone has been able to reconstruct, and a scansion cited against a floor that has since been renumbered must be re-entered at the new number without alteration to the reading — a procedure known as carrying the rhythm forward, which produces records in which the cadence belongs to one floor and the citation to another. The Chamber of Unanswered Questions holds four hundred and eleven such records, filed by cadence rather than by floor, since the floors will not hold still.

Restrictions

Scansion may not be taken in the Contest of the Redundant Gate, in the reading rooms of the School of Latent Structure, or within the hearing of a sitting Concordance. Officiants are reminded that the sixth column is not for notes, and that a scansion taken while ascending is void.