  Recent observations in the theory of verse and empirical metrics have
suggested that constructing a verse line involves a pattern-matching search
through a source text, and that the number of found elements (complete words
totaling a specified number of syllables) is given by dividing the total number
of words by the mean number of syllables per word in the source text. This
paper makes this latter point explicit mathematically, and in the course of
this demonstration shows that the word length frequency totals in English
output are distributed geometrically (previous researchers reported an adjusted
Poisson distribution), and that the sequential distribution is random at the
global level, with significant non-randomness in the fine structure. Data from
a corpus of just under two million words, and a syllable-count lexicon of
71,000 word-forms is reported. The pattern-matching theory is shown to be
internally coherent, and it is observed that some of the analytic techniques
described here form a satisfactory test for regular (isometric) lineation in a
text.
