Rosalía Rodríguez-Vázquez, University of Vigo
Abstract
Optimality
Theory (OT) has established itself as one of the major theoretical
frameworks in segmental phonology. It has recently expanded to cover the
fields of suprasegmental phonology and text-setting. In the last
ten years, several significant papers about the relationship between
linguistic prosody, verse prosody and text-setting have been published
by Dell and Halle (in press), Hayes and Kaun (1996), Kiparsky (2006) and
Rodríguez-Vázquez (in press), among others. The majority of these
papers favour a modular view of text-setting, according to which song'
is a composite which combines two objects each with its own structure, a
linguistic object - text - and a musical object - tune' (Dell and Halle
in press). Kiparsky (2006) fully supports this view of the
metrics/music interface, arguing that the same words can be sung to
different musical measures, maintaining certain invariant constraints on
stanza form. The same claim is made by Fabb and Halle (2008), who
state that there is no necessary connection between the meter of a line
of poetry and the way it is set to music'.
This paper will
present evidence against such modular view of text-setting by analysing
instances of twentieth-century English folksong collected in Kennedy
(1984). I will apply OT metrical and grouping constraints to a
corpus of twentieth-century folk songs in order to prove that i) the
same metrical and grouping constraints are at work and ranked equally in
the text and the tune of English folk songs, ii) the fact that the same
lyrics can be sung to different tunes is only a byproduct of the
recurring meters used in folk-song, iii) in certain vocal genres, the
composer/performer of a song does not construct a match between three
tiers of rhythmic structure - linguistic prominence, poetic metre, and
music rhythm - but between two, namely linguistic prominence and musical
rhythm.
Bibliography
Dell,
F. & J. Halle (in press) "Comparing musical text-setting in French
and in English songs." Ed. Jean-Louis Aroui and Andy Arleo. Towards a typology of poetic forms. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Fabb, N. & H. Morris (2008) Meter in poetry: a new theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hayes, B. & M. MacEachern (1996) "Are there lines in folk poetry?" UCLA Working Papers in Phonology 1:125-142.
Kennedy, P. (1984 [1975]). Folk songs of Britain and Ireland. London: Oak Publications.
Kiparsky, P. (2006) "A modular metrics of folk verse." Eds. Elan B. Dresher and Nila Friedberg. Formal approaches to poetry. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 7-52.
Rodríguez-Vázquez, R. (in press) "Text-setting constraints: a comparative perspective." Australian Journal of Linguistics (special edition on the Language of Song).