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Previous research has shown disagreement regarding the nature of stress in French. Some have maintained that French has lexical stress on the final syllable of each word; others have argued that French has no lexical stress, only phrasal stress. A possible source of evidence on this issue is vocal music. In languages with lexical stress, such as English, it is well known that stressed syllables tend to occur at "strong" positions in the musical meter (some evidence will be presented supporting this view). A corpus analysis was performed to investigate the degree of stress-meter alignment in French songs. The analysis showed that (excluding syllables at the ends of lines) the final syllables of polysyllabic words tend to occur at stronger metrical positions than non-final syllables of those words; it also showed that monosyllabic content words tend to occur at stronger positions than monosyllabic function words. While conflicts between stress and meter are much more common in French than in English vocal music, these results suggest that French poets and composers recognized distinctions of stress between syllables of polysyllabic words and between monosyllabic content and function words.

in this study we examine a rhythmic pattern known as the Scotch Snap (SS): a sixteenth-note on the beat followed by a dotted eighth-note. A musical corpus analysis shows that the SS is common in both Scottish and English songs, but virtually nonexistent in German and Italian songs. We explore possible linguistic correlates for this phenomenon. Our reasoning is that languages in which stressed syllables are often short might tend to favor the SS pattern. The traditional distinction between long and short vowels correlates partly with the SS pattern across languages, but not completely. (German allows short stressed vowels, but the SS pattern is not common in German music.) We then examine the duration of stressed syllables in four modern speech corpora: one British English, one German, and two Italian. British English shows a much higher proportion of very short stressed syllables (less than 100 ms) than the other two languages. Four vowels account for a large proportion of very short stressed syllables in British English, and also constitute a large proportion of SS tokens in our English musical corpus. This is the first study known to us that establishes a correlation between speech rhythms in languages and musical rhythms in the songs of those languages.

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