A first exploration of acceptable and unacceptable discrepancies between linguistic and musical rhythm in Italian songs has uncovered two kinds of discrepancies which do not have counterparts in literary verse: durational discrepancies between adjacent syllables and stress-beat misalignments that involve nonadjacent syllables. The latter type is explored in greater detail than the former. Our survey suggests that analogous misalignments are in principle impossible in literary verse composed in accentual or accentual-syllabic meters, because, on the one hand, the abstract metrical templates that characterize such meters are not anchored in measured time, and, on the other hand, they do not recognize more than two degrees of metrical prominence.2 This is Napoli's stance in her 1978 analysis of Italian nursery rhymes. For a recent illustration of this stance in the analysis of sung verse from a number of the world's poetic traditions, see Fabb & Halle (2008). 3 A similar position is taken in the case of English by Hayes and his co-workers in articles published during the last two decades, and by Dell & Halle (2009) in the case of French and English.

This paper focuses on the interaction of speech tones and musical pitches in Fe'Fe' Bamileke, a Grassfields Bantu language of Cameroon. Like earlier studies of tonal text-setting, it aims to test the hypothesis that, in song, the melodic contour of tunes matches the tonal contour of the lyrics. The study is based on four songs and was carried out with the help of a native speaker who provided the songs and accurate feedback on the musical settings. His acceptability judgments of musical settings in song #4 were integrated into the study to complement the evidence from song data. Most of the paper is a detailed discussion of the findings, and the methodology employed for measuring the degree of correspondence between speech and song. Some issues with a bearing on the interpretation of the data are addressed, and alternative analyses are proposed. It is argued that all of the suggested analyses have drawbacks and, as revealed through a comparison of the different sets of results, need to be supplemented with qualitative approaches that evaluate the interaction between the phonological and musical systems involved.

The last decades have witnessed a shift from anecdotal remarks concerning the “marriage” of music and lyrics in songs towards a more scientific approach to the matter. Textsetting has thus become the object of more formal analyses accounting for the regularities observed in individual singing traditions with regard to the mapping of linguistic material on musical structures. This paper illustrates the nature of the problem and reflects the status of the research on textsetting in living traditions. It is addressed to a wide audience of linguists interested in the relationship between language and music and points to the challenges that await the further development of this field of studies under the umbrella of linguistics.

La poesía métrica es la fuente primaria de evidencia lingüística para la reconstrucción del sistema de acentuación de una lengua muerta, y en particular la métrica que controla la coincidencia o ajuste entre acento lingüístico y posiciones fuertes. para el inglés medio, la distribución del acento léxico a través de los esquemas débil/fuerte del pentámetro yámbico, desde chaucer hasta shakespeare, ha ofrecido información importante para el análisis lingüístico. además de la poesía hablada, las canciones proveen otro tipo de poesía métrica presente en este periodo que, sin embargo, aún no ha sido explotado como fuente de evidencia métrica o lingüística. el presente trabajo intenta contribuir a llenar este vacío a través del estudio diacrónico del desajuste prominente.The primary source of linguistic evidence in reconstructing stress systems is provided by metered poetry, particularly by meters that control the matching of the linguistic stress to metrical strong positions. For middle english, the distribution of lexical stress across the weak/strong patterns of iambic pentameter, from chaucer to shakespeare, has provided important clues for linguistic analysis. in addition to spoken poetry, songs provide another type of metered poetry from that period. however, they have not been exploited as a source of metrical or linguistic evidence. the present paper takes a tentative step towards filling this gap, by focusing on a diachronic study of prominence mismatching.