The Mapping Of Metrical Structure Onto The Rhythmic Patterns In Music In Chinese

This thesis investigates the mapping of metrical structure onto the rhythmic patterns in music in Chinese,namely text setting study.Text setting refers to the alignment of syllables in lyrical text to the metrical positions in musical accompaniment,including melody preceding lyrics,lyrics preceding melody,and melody and lyrics synchrony.Native speakers could easily set novel text to given musical rhythms with a fair extent of agreement.Previous studies demonstrate the matching between stressed syllables in lyrics and strong metrical positions in music as a fundamental constraint in text setting(Halle & Lerdahl 1993;Halle 1999;Hayes2005).As a tonal language,word stress pattern in Standard Chinese is obscure in that native speakers may find it difficult to make prominence judgment,and researchers have vast disagreement on the metrical structure in Standard Chinese.Therefore,text setting provides a window into how people unconsciously employ their metrical knowledge when doing tasks.Based on a self-built corpus consisting of 40 Mandarin songs with clear rhythmic patterns of a variety of genres including rap songs,this study examines the alignment of lyrical text to the metrical positions in musical accompaniment involved in text setting in Standard Chinese.With the stressed syllables in linguistic text identified by the generalized trochee hypothesis(Sui 2013),the statistical results of this study suggest that text setting in Standard Chinese obeys the constraint of stress-to-strong mapping,especially for rap songs in which almost all the ‘precious' strong metrical positions in the backdrop of beats correspond to stressed syllables,which provides further phonological evidence from an innovation perspective for the hypothesis of trochaic metrical structure in Standard Chinese.In addition,this thesis confirms that text setting is constrained by constituency mapping tendency between musical phrases and prosodic phrases.These two main findings are in line with those in Sui's(2013)experiment-based text setting study.Besides,this thesis attempts to give an explanation for the misalignment of stress-to-strong as well as unstress-to-weak.Under the framework of Optimality Theory,text setting is demonstrated to conform to a set of conflicting ranked constraints proposed by Hayes(2005)apart from the constraint of stress-to-strongmapping.To obtain a well-formed text setting in accordance with people's intuitions,the constraints STRESS IN STRONG and UNSTRESS IN WEAK sometimes have to be violated to meet higher-ranking constraints.On the basis of the cases of ill-formed text setting by Hayes' s text setting constraints,this thesis makes a modest revision of the text setting constraints proposed by Hayes(2005)by adding a new constraint LAST-TO-STRONG ranked before the constraints STRESS IN STRONG and STRESSLESS IN WEAK,which requires the last syllable to be mapped to the final strong metrical position within a musical phrase.Since tone is shown to influence prominence judgment(Deng 2010),this study also investigates whether tone of syllables have influence in text setting.According to the statistical results,tone plays a minor role in text setting in that strong metrical positions are more likely to be aligned with syllables with the Falling tone compared with other tones,especially for rap songs,and unlikely to be mapped with syllables with the neutral tone.The significance of the findings of this study is stated as follow: 1)it confirms the validity of the constraint of stress-to-strong alignment in text setting in Standard Chinese on the basis of self-built corpus;2)it provides a kind of innovative evidence for the trochaic metrical structure hypothesis for Standard Chinese since the word stress in lyrics is determined by the generalized trochee hypothesis(Sui 2013)in this study;3)it suggests that tone plays a role in text setting.