Rhythm in prose

This paper deals with the question of whether some texts written in prose have special rhythmic properties that can be linguistically measured and thereby objectified. To this end I compare the first part of a short story by Judith Hermann, a German author whose prose is considered by most reviewers as exceedingly rhythmic, and an arbitrarily chosen newspaper article which hypothetically should indeed instantiate the trochaic-dactylic standard rhythm of German, but should not be as rhythmic as for instance Hermann's text. I develop a format for representing the relevant prosodic features and use a small computer program which is able to find what I call >> metrical islands << in prose. The program makes transparent the rhythmic differences between the two text examples and therefore confirms the intuition-based judgements of average readers and listeners. Although aware of the yet lacking statistical significance of the data these first results of an ongoing enterprise seem sufficiently clear enough to me to be convinced of being on the right track and to hope that some other passengers will buy a ticket as well.