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Song alignment question
Singing and the syllable.
This question, composed by François Dell, is about how speech and song are related. In some well-known cases the syllable is the basic unit for alignment to song. Does anyone know of singing traditions in which notes of song correspond not to syllables, but to moras, or to stress feet? Please contribute to the thread about Singing and the syllable.
What can singing teach us about language? One thing singing shows is the need for the notion of syllable. Singing involves a correspondence between a text and sequence of notes (a melody); see examples in (3), (4), (10) and (18) on the handout of my presentation. [Clicking on this link will download the pdf file of Dell's handout in some browsers, and simply open it in others.] In Dell's view, this correspondence is governed by the following principle (v. (5)):
BTP (Basic Textsetting Principle): Every SYLLABLE is linked to one and only one note (but not every note needs to be linked to a syllable), and different syllables may not be linked to the same note.
In the preceding formulation of the BTP, suppose we replace ‘syllable’ by some other linguistic chunk. The chunk in question could for instance be (A) a voiced vocoid (i.e. a voiced nonconsonantal segment) or (B) a maximal sequence containing only voiced vocoids. With (A), the word “Hawaiian” must be linked to five notes: [h<ə><w><a><j><ə>n]; with (B), it must be linked to one note: [h<əwajə>n]. Such ways of singing are presumably not attested in any language.
The BTP holds for languages as diverse as English, French, Tashlhiyt Berber, Mandarin Chinese, and Tagalog. Does it hold for all languages? Let us assume that it is a fact that cases (A) and (B) are not attested among the world’s singing traditions. The chunks in cases (A) and (B), are well-defined objects, but they are not genuine linguistic units, and maybe this is the reason why cases (A) and (B) don’t exist. What about genuine linguistic units such as moras or stress feet — are notes ever aligned with these units?
This question, composed by François Dell, is about how speech and song are related. In some well-known cases the syllable is the basic unit for alignment to song. Does anyone know of singing traditions in which notes of song correspond not to syllables, but to moras, or to stress feet? Please contribute to the thread about Singing and the syllable.
What can singing teach us about language? One thing singing shows is the need for the notion of syllable. Singing involves a correspondence between a text and sequence of notes (a melody); see examples in (3), (4), (10) and (18) on the handout of my presentation. [Clicking on this link will download the pdf file of Dell's handout in some browsers, and simply open it in others.] In Dell's view, this correspondence is governed by the following principle (v. (5)):
BTP (Basic Textsetting Principle): Every SYLLABLE is linked to one and only one note (but not every note needs to be linked to a syllable), and different syllables may not be linked to the same note.
In the preceding formulation of the BTP, suppose we replace ‘syllable’ by some other linguistic chunk. The chunk in question could for instance be (A) a voiced vocoid (i.e. a voiced nonconsonantal segment) or (B) a maximal sequence containing only voiced vocoids. With (A), the word “Hawaiian” must be linked to five notes: [h<ə><w><a><j><ə>n]; with (B), it must be linked to one note: [h<əwajə>n]. Such ways of singing are presumably not attested in any language.
The BTP holds for languages as diverse as English, French, Tashlhiyt Berber, Mandarin Chinese, and Tagalog. Does it hold for all languages? Let us assume that it is a fact that cases (A) and (B) are not attested among the world’s singing traditions. The chunks in cases (A) and (B), are well-defined objects, but they are not genuine linguistic units, and maybe this is the reason why cases (A) and (B) don’t exist. What about genuine linguistic units such as moras or stress feet — are notes ever aligned with these units?
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| Started By | Thread Subject | Replies | Last Post | ||
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| cecairns | Song alignment | 1 | Jun 30 2008, 6:59 PM EDT by fdell | ||
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Thread started: Feb 16 2008, 9:48 AM EST
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The question of alignment of song and phonological units is very interesting. Consider the theory of 3-D representation (from Halle, Vergnaud, Idsardi, and others), with the X-tier representing the line from which various half-planes radiate; these planes are, for example, the feature tier, the metrical tier (for stress), and so on. Dell's question is whether or not song aligns universally only with representations on the syllable tier. What other paraphonological objects align with these 3-D representations, and with which units? What are the implications of these alignment phenomena for our theories of representation?
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3-D representation
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