The Prosodic Structure Of The German And The French Language And Its Representation In Music: A Contrastive Study

The German and the French language belong to the Germanic and Romancesubgroups of the Indo-European language family, respectively. These languages canbe contrasted in terms of their phonological and prosodic features. This thesisproposes that their musical systems, just like their languages, as two uniquecommunication systems of human beings，can also be analogized. Based on thisperspective, this thesis has two aims: First, it presents a study contrasting German andFrench prosodic structure; Second，it puts forward a hypothetical analogy betweenlanguage and music.This thesis will ifrst introduce some phonological facts about German andFrench (vowel-consonant inventory, distinctive phonological rules) and their prosodicfeatures (syllable, stress, isochrony) in order to provide a theoretical basis for theexperiment that follows next. Through Praat software we analysed the duration andthe continuity of the pitch contours of both speech and music samples, and comparedthe temporal ratio of the voiced sounds between the two countries’ language andmusic, trying to establish the national identity in the Voiced Temporal Ratio in the twocommunication systems to explore the hypothetical language-music analogy. Theifnal chapter points out some limitations of the scope of its research and providessuggestions for further research.