Di Prete, Davide; (2025) Catalexis in Italian pop and rap songs. Presented at: PhD Day 2025 (UCL), London, UK.

Preview

Text Di Prete_2025b - Catalexis in Italian pop and rap songs.pdf Download (14MB) | Preview

Abstract

Italian prosody regularly alternates strong and weak syllables. Pop and rap songs also present a similar pattern in the grouping and metrical structure of the musical beat. Whenever possible, strong syllables coincide with musical downbeats (alignment). When textsetting is misaligned, beats force foot restructuring. On the right. In my corpus of Italian songs, when a final stray syllable aligns with the musical downbeats, primary stress shifts onto it – an example of protraction. I provide examples that a degenerate foot at the end of the word is not only ‘stressable’ (Nespor, 1993, Lepschy & Lepschy, 1977), but also ‘repairable’. The protraction forces the unary foot to branch, resorting it to a default trochee on the right. A left-headed, binary foot is then created: the strong syllable on the downbeat, head of the constituent, governs a prosodically relevant – but segmentally empty – element (catalexis; Jakobs, 1994). E.g., ‘città’ (town) = [(.tʃit.)<.ta.>] ⟶ [(.tʃit.)(.ˈta.∅.)]. On the left. Musical triplets are left-headed ternary rhythmic elements. They create phenomenal accents (Lerdahl & Jackendoff, 1983) with the onset of the triplet being metrically stronger than the following two notes. When ternary linguistic strings are sung in triplets, data from my corpus show a preference for text-tune alignment (Proto & Dell, 2013), both word-internally and across word boundaries. Moreover, headless triplets (i.e., triplets whose onset aligns with a rest) show preference of alignment with headless ternary feet. The head of these feet is visible to the algorithm – governing only weak syllables, but segmentally empty, once again: a particular case of catalexis on the left. E.g., ‘le sorrido’ (I smile to her) = [(.ˌle.sor.)(.ˈriː.do.)] ⟶ [(.ˌ∅.le.sor.)(.ˈriː.do.)]. In conclusion, the text-tune composite reveals that catalexis is active both on the right, e.g., [mes.ki.ni.taʔ.∅.] from "Scrupoli" (Daniele Silvestri, 2023) and on the left, e.g., [.∅.tjak.kom.paɲ.ɲo] from "…E penso a te" (Lucio Battisti, 1972). Moreover, the composite shows that iambs and trochees coexist in Italian textsetting, although this raises the question of whether iambs are truly iambs (see Super Repair Strategy; Di Prete, 2024b). Ternary feet are set on duple metre just as binary feet are often set on ternary metre (hemiola). Finally, headless triplets provide evidence of ternary rhythm alignment.

Download activity - last month

Export as XMLCSVJSON

Download activity - last 12 months

Export as JSONXMLCSV

Downloads by country - last 12 months

Export as JSONXMLCSV

Archive Staff Only

View Item