ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with poetic prosody in Classical Chinese. It is shown that the Archaic Chinese prosody had undergone a change from moraic foot structure (a foot consisted of at least two moras) to syllabic foot structure (a foot consisted of at least two syllables). After the establishment of a disyllabic foot system, the poetic prosody interacting with the morphosyllabic property of the language gives rise to four-, three-, five-and seven-syllable lines within the poetic system of Classical Chinese.
