Colloquium New Series No. 115

Among the challenges in the study of Chinese prosody is the fact that the myriad dialects share too much: history, contact, literature, lexicon, and yes, even music! The intense interwovenness makes separate study of each dialect’s prosody deeply unsatisfying. Yet, avoidance of the comparative fallacy necessitates separation of analyses for each dialect. This talk attempts the prosodic study from a different angle: going out of linguistics into music, and going a little back in time.

On the continuum of Chinese musical great and little traditions, let me suggest that folk songs are comparable to a basilect, operatic arts are more mesolectal, and literati music an acrolect. Thus folk songs have very distinct local flavors, while operatic arts such as kunqu lean towards some approximation idealized Chinese, and guqin music is shared easily by literati regardless of dialectal origins. Two characteristics emerge in these musics that should trigger a linguist keen on prosody. Firstly, the musics are largely ametrical. Secondly, where singing is involved, melisma is common and quite extreme. At the acrolectal level, these two properties cut across dialect boundaries, and converge on the fact that the Chinese syllable is typically a minimal prosodic word. This implies that the syllable is the minimum foot, which provides the tonal domain that encourages melismatic singing.