Prosody as a system of
suprasegmental linguistic information such as rhythm and intonation is
a prime candidate for looking at the relation between language and
music in a principled way. This claim is based on several aspects:
- First, prosody is concerned with acoustic
correlates of language and music that are directly comparable with
each other by their physical properties such as duration and
pitch.
- Second, prosodic accounts suggest a
hierarchical organization of prosodic units that not only resembles a
syntactic hierarchy, but is viewed as (part of) an interface to
syntax.
- Third, prosody provides a very promising
ground for evolutionary accounts of language and music.
- Fourth, bilateral transfer effects between
language and music are best illustrated on the level of prosody.
Highlighting the first two aspects, this book
shows that it is a fruitful endeavor to use prosody for a principled
comparison of language and music. In its broader sense, prosody as
sound structure of communicative systems may be considered a
»meta«-language that formalizes the way of "how music
speaks to language and vice versa". Prosody is firmly established
within linguistic theory, but is also applied in the musical domain.
Therefore, prosody is not just a field of inquiry that shares elements
or features between music and language, but can additionally provide a
common conceptual ground.
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