A method comparison analysis examining the relationship between linguistic tone, melodic tune, and sung performances of children’s songs in Chicahuaxtla Triqui: Findings and implications for documentary linguistics and indigenous language communities
| dc.contributor.author | Elliott, A. Raymond | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2020-03-04T00:17:13Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2020-03-04T00:17:13Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2020-03 | |
| dc.description.abstract | Linguistic tones play an important role in expressing lexical and grammatical meaning in tone languages. A small change in the pitch of a word can result in an entirely different meaning. A logical question for those who document tone languages is whether or not singers preserve linguistic tone when singing and if so, to what degree? I begin by providing an overview of research in documentary linguistics that examines the interrelationship between linguistic tone and melody in tone languages. While the majority of articles have focused on Asian and African languages, there is only one investigation by Pike (1939) that examined the relationship between tone and tune in an unspecified variety of Mixtec, an Otomanguean language. In order to further our understanding of the tone-tune relationship, especially with regard to Otomanguean languages, I use three separate procedures for looking at the interrelationship between tone and tune in spoken, sung, and played performances of two popular children’s songs in Chicahuaxtla Triqui. While the first experiment yielded a non-significant relationship between linguistic tone and note transitions in the musical scores, the second and third experiments showed that the pitch traces of the spoken and played performances of the songs both relate to and perhaps influence pitch transitions and pitch transition differentials in the sung performances. The overall finding is that the song melody appears to exert a greater influence on the pitch tracings of the sung performances than does linguistic tone as measured in the spoken performances of the songs. With regard to experimental studies examining tone and tune, this study suggests that a set of well-defined prosodic features, such as overall pitch range, average F_0, F_0 for individual tones, and the difference between adjacent tones as measured in Hz, need to be considered when comparing tone to melodic tune. Simply correlating the correspondence or directionality of linguistic tones to that of the note transitions in musical scores does not appear to be promising nor sensitive enough to reveal the true interrelationship between tone and tune. This article ends with a discussion of the benefits of documenting songs in tone languages for linguists in addition to the advantages of teaching music to children of indigenous language communities. | |
| dc.description.sponsorship | National Foreign Language Resource Center | |
| dc.format.extent | 49 pages | |
| dc.identifier.citation | Elliott, A. Raymond. 2020. A method comparison analysis examining the relationship between linguistic tone, melodic tune, and sung performances of children’s songs in Chicahuaxtla Triqui: Findings and implications for documentary linguistics and indigenous language communities. Language Documentation & Conservation 14: 139-187. | |
| dc.identifier.issn | 1934-5275 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24919 | |
| dc.language.iso | en-US | |
| dc.publisher | University of Hawaii Press | |
| dc.rights | Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International | |
| dc.rights | Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States | * |
| dc.rights.uri | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/ | * |
| dc.subject | Music | |
| dc.subject | Musical pitch | |
| dc.subject | tone | |
| dc.subject | language documentation | |
| dc.subject | indigenous languages | |
| dc.subject | Chicahuaxtla Triqui | |
| dc.subject | singing | |
| dc.subject | language maintenance | |
| dc.subject | language conservation | |
| dc.title | A method comparison analysis examining the relationship between linguistic tone, melodic tune, and sung performances of children’s songs in Chicahuaxtla Triqui: Findings and implications for documentary linguistics and indigenous language communities | |
| dc.type | Article | |
| dc.type.dcmi | Text | |
| prism.endingpage | 187 | |
| prism.publicationname | Language Documentation & Conservation | |
| prism.startingpage | 139 | |
| prism.volume | 14 |