Musically-conditioned stress shift in Spanish revisited

Morgan, Terrell A.; Janda, Richard

doi:10.1075/cilt.60.18mor

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Stressed syllables also play an important role in musical text-setting, or the mapping of speech to musical rhythms. Specifically, stressed syllables are found to map consistently to musically-strong beats in several languages (Dell & Halle, 2009;Lerdahl & Jackendoff, 1983;Morgan & Janda, 1989;Temperley & Temperley, 2012), though this mapping constraint is more stringent in some languages than others. Stressed syllables also tend to show privileged status for coordination in speech-motor tasks such as rhythmic hand-tapping to speech (Allen, 1972;Rathcke, Lin, Falk, & Dalla Bella, 2021) and for alignment with an external stimulus such as a metronome (Cummins, 1997;Cummins & Port, 1998;Tajima, 1998;Tajima & Port, 2003).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How we speak when we speak to a beat: The influence of temporal coupling on phonetic enhancement

Franich

2022

Laboratory Phonology

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Stressed syllables in languages which have them tend to show two interesting properties: They show patterns of phonetic ‘enhancement’ at the articulatory and acoustic levels, and they also show coordinative properties. They typically play a key role in coordinating speech with co-speech gesture, in coordination with a musical beat, and in other sensorimotor synchronization tasks such as speech-coordinated beat tapping and metronome timing. While various phonological theories have considered stress from both of these perspectives, there is as yet no clear explanation as to how these properties relate to one another. The present work tests the hypothesis that aspects of phonetic enhancement may in fact be driven by coordination itself by observing how phonetic patterns produced by speakers of two prosodically-distinct languages—English and Medʉmba (Grassfields Bantu)—vary as a function of timing relations with an imaginary metronome beat. Results indicate that production of syllables in time (versus on the ‘offbeat’) with the imaginary beat led to increased duration and first formant frequency—two widely observed correlates of syllable stress—for speakers of both languages. These results support the idea that some patterns of phonetic enhancement may have their roots in coordinative practices. 

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How we speak when we speak to a beat: The influence of temporal coupling on phonetic enhancement

Franich

2022

Laboratory Phonology

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“…While the stringency of the constraints governing the mapping of stressed syllables to specific musical beats varies across languages and musical genres, stress nonetheless appears to play an important role in text-setting across a range of languages and musical traditions. For example, evidence from Spanish children's songs presented by Morgan and Janda (1989) demonstrates a tendency for musical downbeats (i.e., the first beat of each measure) to be matched with stressed syllables. They also demonstrate that mismatches between stress and beat strength are tolerated in cases where conflicts arise between a word's syllable count and its stress pattern; in other words, the musical rhythmic structure of a song line is less likely to be altered to accommodate stress patterns, as is commonly done in English songs (e.g., in Figure 1 for Old MacDonald).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feeling the Beat in an African Tone Language: Rhythmic Mapping Between Language and Music

Franich

Ngnemzué

2021

Front. Commun.

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Text-setting patterns in music have served as a key data source in the development of theories of prosody and rhythm in stress-based languages, but have been explored less from a rhythmic perspective in the realm of tone languages. African tone languages have been especially under-studied in terms of rhythmic patterns in text-setting, likely in large part due to the ill-understood status of metrical structure and prosodic prominence asymmetries in many of these languages. Here, we explore how language is mapped to rhythmic structure in traditional folksongs sung in Medʉmba, a Grassfields Bantu language spoken in Cameroon. We show that, despite complex and varying rhythmic structures within and across songs, correspondences emerge between musical rhythm and linguistic structure at the level of stem position, tone, and prosodic structure. Our results reinforce the notion that metrical prominence asymmetries are present in African tone languages, and that they play an important coordinative role in music and movement.

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“…Apart from discourse factors, the variability of stress assignment in some languages may be subject to additional constraints that apply only in certain domains, such as poetry or music. For example, in Spanish songs, word stress can shift for metrical reasons (see e.g Morgan & Janda 1989)…”

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The Role of Semantics, Argument Structure, and Lexicalization in Compound Stress Assignment in English

Plag¹,

Kunter²,

Lappe³

et al. 2008

lan

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It is generally assumed that noun-noun compounds in English are stressed on the left-hand member (e.g. cóurtroom, wátchmaker). However, there is a large amount of variation in stress assignment (e.g. silk tíe, Madison Á venue, singer-sóngwriter) whose significance and sources are largely unaccounted for in the literature. This article presents a study in which three kinds of factors held to play a role in compound stress assignment are tested: argument structure, lexicalization, and semantics. The analysis of 4,353 noun-noun compounds extracted from the Boston University Radio Speech Corpus shows that there is indeed a considerable amount of variation in stress assignment. Overall, semantics turns out to have the strongest effect on compound stress assignment, whereas an approach relying on argument structure is much less successful in predicting compound stress. The article presents for the first time large-scale empirical evidence for the assumption that lexicalization has an effect on compound stress assignment. The article also makes a methodological contribution to the debate in showing that (and how) corpus-based studies using acoustic measurements can shed new light on the issue of variable compound stress.* * The first three authors wish to dedicate this article to their academic teacher, mentor, and friend Rüdiger Zimmermann, Professor and Chair of English Linguistics at the University of Marburg, on the occasion of his retirement in September 2008. Rüdiger has been a great source of inspiration for all three of us, and our research team owes much to his generosity and support. We also would like to thank two sets of Language referees and the editor Brian Joseph for their very helpful and detailed remarks on earlier versions of this article. We are also grateful for the comments we received at the following talks, colloquia, and conferences where we presented material from this article:

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Musically-conditioned stress shift in Spanish revisited

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

How we speak when we speak to a beat: The influence of temporal coupling on phonetic enhancement

How we speak when we speak to a beat: The influence of temporal coupling on phonetic enhancement

Feeling the Beat in an African Tone Language: Rhythmic Mapping Between Language and Music

The Role of Semantics, Argument Structure, and Lexicalization in Compound Stress Assignment in English

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