A natural way of thinking of prosody is that it concerns the musical
aspects of language.1 According to the very
first sentence in the wikipedia entry for music,
Element | Psychological properties | Physical properties |
---|---|---|
pitch (intonation, melody) | "high" vs. "low" | frequency |
dynamics | loud vs. quiet ("soft") | amplitude |
rhythm (duration, meter, tempo, articulation) | long vs. short, stressed vs. unstressed, fast vs. slow, "smooth" (legato) vs. "choppy" (staccato) | organization of units in time |
timbre, "color" ("texture" is irrelevant for our purposes) | piano vs. oboe; my voice vs. your voice | overtones |
Spoken language prosody is able to use these elements (or at least some of them) right off the shelf, as it were. But how can these elements be expressed in or translated into the visual-gestural modality? Here is a list of questions intended to help us explore that question. In some cases, the questions are closely related and just different ways of getting at the same point.
In answering the questions, the following information about sound
may be helpful:
|
Thanks to Mark Liberman and Jian-jing Kuang for the following information.
The basis for the high-low metaphor for pitch might be that high sounds tend to require more effort to produce (watch Diana Dammrau sing the Queen of the Night aria), just like things that are high require more effort to get down or it requires more effort to jump higher. Low sounds, on the other hand, require lowering of the larynx, which we can perceive kinesthetically.
Not all languages use the high-low metaphor for pitch. In Classical Greek and Latin described high-pitched sounds or accents on vowels as 'sharp' (Classical Greek oxys, Latin acutus). Low-pitched sounds were described as 'heavy' (Classical Greek barys, Latin gravis).
English also uses 'sharp' and 'flat' to describe deviations from an intended pitch in music. So the same type of mixed metaphor as Greek and Latin.
According to Mark Liberman, "In one of the West African languages we studied in field methods (Yoruba?), I recall that in drum ensembles a high-pitched drum is called the 'father drum' and the low-pitched one is the 'mother drum' because the high-pitched drum plays a free solo while the low-pitched drum plays a steady supporting accompaniment. (This memory needs to be checked...)"
Here are two references that look comprehensive:
Metaphors for musical pitch vary, but the basic principles are the same
The thickness of pitch: Crossmodal metaphors in Farsi, Turkish, and Zapotec