accentualistn.

1899 C. M. Gayley & F. N. Scott Introd. Methods & Materials Lit. Crit. vii. 472 He [sc. S. Lanier] attributes the theory of the accentualists to their confusion of ‘primary rhythm’ (quantity) with ‘secondary rhythm’ (the arrangement of pitch and stress).

1910 G. Saintsbury Hist. Man. Eng. Prosody (1919) i. ii. 8 According to the more reckless and thorough-going accentualists—the view is expressed..in Coleridge's celebrated Preface to Christabel—all you have got to do is look to the accents.

1937 Downside Rev. 55 349 Father Robertson allows himself occasionally to enunciate rhythmic principles which run directly counter both to the theory and the practice of the accentualists.

1940 G. Reese Mus. Middle Ages v. 141 The accentualists..consider the accent the principal—according to some, the only—rhythmical determinant of its melodies.

1954 Grove's Dict. Music (ed. 5) VI. 820/1 The Accentualists hold that the change from quantity to accent in both Greek and Latin in about the 5th century caused the longs and shorts in the chant to change to notes of equal value and that the principal and secondary accents of particular syllables in particular words..determine the rhythm of that phrase.

1980 C. O. Hartman Free Verse ii. 37 Though he [sc. George Saintsbury] was sometimes called an ‘accentualist’, this meant only that he frowned on too much emphasis on quantity. Unlike a true accentualist, he analyzed English lines in terms of feet; but for him they were composed of stressed and unstressed, not long and short, syllables.

2003 Compar. Lit. 55 139 In sharp contrast to an avowed accentualist like Taylor, the Edinburgh Review, in 1805, savagely..jeered at ‘that disgusting abortion which is called the German hexameter’.