Young Researchers' Workshop

Abstract

This paper discusses researching a link between the patterns of different modes of communication: language and music. Research on musical schemas has revealed a common pairing of musical patterns that serve particular functions within a musical piece. For example, Gjerdingen (2007) has shown that this system of musical “blocks” was a common means of musical production in the Western classical music tradition. In a similar manner, within linguistics, construction grammar researchers argue that language utilizes multiple levels of form-function pairings: like the symbolic pairing of a form, sound, and meaning to form a word, even sentences carry an arbitrary, but conventionalized, pairing of a certain structure or form and a meaning (e.g. X causes Y to Z, the Xer the Yer). There are several parallels between musical schema and linguistic constructions (cf. Gjerdingen & Bourne 2015). For instance, both entail a system of categories, from which certain elements can be selected and interchanged in the various “slots” in the forms. Nevertheless, to draw conclusions about common cognitive mechanisms for language and music, further, cross-cultural evidence of musical schemas is needed. Another area in need of research is the relationship between constructions and linguistic tones, as well as songs (musical patterns plus linguistic constructions) and even songs in tonal languages, in which melodies can restrict choice of language or vice versa (cf. Schellenberg, 2013). I will present exploratory, preliminary findings of research on the songs of the ethnic minority Dong people in Guizhou, China. Historically, the Dong people have no orthography for their highly-tonal language (Kam), yet they have a rich tradition of singing (cf. Long & Zheng 1998; Ingram 2013). This research will investigate if and how they may use a similar form-function pairing of musical schemas. For example, their use of a sor or “musical habitus” (Ingram 2012) may be indications of categorization of musical entities and prefabricated chunking similar to constructions in language. Another indicator is their rising, second interval musical “idiom” that is often used to signal the end of musical sections or songs. The Dong singing tradition offers an opportunity to investigate a human cultural artefact to help understand the cognitive relationship between music and language. Moreover, without an orthographic system, it is a chance to research the use music as a cultural replacement of some aspects of language.