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Timing in language and music: the rythm of speech, verse and music in English
and Spanish| old_uid | 1790 |
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| title | Timing in language and music: the rythm of speech, verse and music in English
and Spanish |
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| start_date | 2006/11/20 |
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| schedule | 10h-12h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | The study of verse and music, as well as of their interaction in song, has contributed to widening our knowledge of what linguistic rhythm is and how it is related to other levels of human cognition. Some years ago, metrical phonology (Liberman 1979) devised a methodological apparatus which used tools borrowed from music in order to analyse speech rhythm. Generative linguistics was the basis for one of the most groundbreaking theories of tonal music (Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983), which in turn became a precursor to Optimality Theory (OT). OT has recently been applied to the study of English metrics (Hayes and MacEachern 1998), as well as to the analysis of text-setting in English (Hayes 2006) and French (Dell and Halle 2006).
Following from all the above theories, the general theoretical frame of my talk has to do with the study, from an interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic point of view, of the typological dichotomy between stress-timed and syllable-timed languages, inasmuch as this distinction is valid at all. As a preliminary step I carry out a comparative examination of the basic prosodic characteristics of English and Spanish, in order to then analyse the standard versification systems of these two languages. In the central part of my talk, I explore the most important text-setting constraints as applied to a sample corpus of English (stress-timed) and Spanish (syllable-timed) folk songs. The original field recordings of the songs will be played in order to illustrate this analysis.
The results that I will be presenting have to do with a correspondence between the timing typologies of language and rhythmic typologies of music, where (a) the delimitation of lines responds to syllable-related constraints in Spanish, while it is linked to stress in English, (b) the agreement between linguistic stress and musical beat is enforced in English, while this enforcement happens only in certain positions in Spanish. Summarising, I will argue that there is a correlation between the rhythmic characteristics of a specific language and the ranking of constraints in text-setting. |
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| responsibles | Aroui |
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