Metrical Patterns and Melodicity in English Contrasted with French

It is often considered that English is Trochaic at the foot level (and this may explain the tendency to leftward-ho! stress shift at the word level), but that at the higher levels a syntactically based Iambic broad-focus pattern dominates. The presence of Trochaic patterns at the higher level has then either to be explained by information structured stress shifts(de-accentuation of back-ground information, contrastive stress, etc.) or by the application of automatic meaning-neutral rhythm based shifts which avoid the stress clashes that would result from the application of the Iambic patterns (automatic pistol /3020 10/ Æ /2030 10/ ). I will suggest that there is in fact variability between this higher level syntactic based Iambic patterning and one in which the rhythmically based structure (typical of eurhythmic realisations) is trochaic all the way up to the highest level, which alone is Iambic; and this would be very close to the Traditional British “initial-strong Head + final-strong Tonic” structure. Contrasting English with French, I also argue that it is necessary to distinguish two types of strongly melodic realisation. The first concerns the organisation of tones within a single Tone Group (intra-contour patterning) typical of the “chant” or “the melodic cliché” Fonagy [1]. The second concerns the rhythmic organisation of contours between themselves possibly across T.G.s(inter-contour patterning) for which the term “Sing-songy”, or “Swinging” realisation, would seem more appropriate. 1. Chants and “Swinging” Realisations Although both melodic patterns occur in English, which tends to stress-based timing, the “flatter” rhythmic patterning of syllable-based timing in French is not inducive to “swinging” realisations, and French speakers frequently use the chant where English speakers would use this realisation. Bernard Tranel [7] gives the striking example of children’s ‘counting chants’ in English and French to illustrate the fact that English tends to be a stressed timed language: only the stressed syllables count for the rhythm, literally, when children count each other out or in; while as French is predominantly a syllable timed language every syllable counts for the rhythm(except that is, if the unstressed syllable contains a so called mute ). I have used the term counting chant for French ‘comptine’; and the French comptine below (1a) is indeed usually chanted as in (2a), in the sense defined in Hind (5) and Fonagy (1). The characteristic of this type of realisation, which would account for its melodicity, is the relative sustained level or stability of the intonation contour within the syllable (“régularité micro-mélodique”); and this chanted realisation (2a) shows remarkable stability even across syllables, remaining within a quarter tone, or so, of Do3 (C3). Although Tranel was quite right to use this French counting chant “intuitively” to help students of French understand that every syllable counts equally, quite literally, in French: in a spoken realisation of the French ‘comptine’, the unstressed syllables are indeed of almost equal strength and duration., the final strongest syllable having only slightly greater duration than the preceding weak syllables. In point of fact, it is at least partly to escape from this syllable-equal timing constraint that the chant mode is employed here: in the chant, the final strong syllable of the group can undergo considerable lengthening, marking it off rhythmically from the preceding weak syllables far more clearly than in the nonchanted French realisation. 1) Children’s counting chants: a) French spoken b) English Iambs wk (wk) STR1 | Trochaic STR wk un peTIT / coCHON | /EEni /MEEni /MIni /MO É pendu AU / plaFOND | /CATCH a /TIger /BY the /TOEÉ2 Now, In the trochaic rhythmic timing of the English ‘comptine’, each strong pivotal syllable ‘borrows time’ from the following trailing weak syllable. The final monosyllable, however, tends to be “stretched” to be worth the time-value of a complete strong-weak trochee. The final and strongest 1 Anapaests are complex iambs as Dactyls are complex trochees (see 17). 2 apologies for the implied cruelty to tigers syllable of the line is thus marked off by increased length, as in the French chant, but in this case it is due to the “normal” constraints on stress timing (see (2b) above). The strong melodicity is here directly related to the rhythmic organisation of the « swinging head » in which each low-level trochaic foot is repeatedly aligned with an identical L+ H »% contour obtained by cascade dissimilation from the final « L % » juncture tone of the H* L + L% » contour. The « Sing-songy » effect is due to contour repetition rather than tonal stability. This swinging foot-aligned head pattern in British English occurs in spontaneous discourse contexts in what Halliday [3] calls intense realisations, as in (3): 3) (He) / SAID he’d / VOTE for a Re/PUBlican. / L+ H % / L+ H% / H* L L% (Exasperated: he did not do what he said he would do) Increased melodicity can be achieved by combining the singsongy head while echoing the L H% pattern even on the Tonic: 4) (He) /SAID he’d / VOTE for a Re/PUBlican. / L+ H % / L+ H % / L* H L L% (Sing-songy mocking realisation: I am scathing about the fact that this was his intention (French, “Na-Na Nere”).) I recently heard this complex sing-songy mocking realisation on BBC Prime, as an interviewee riled his interviewer, Louis Theroux. The Swinging-Head contour can even be force-aligned on a text which would not normally pattern trochaically: 6) / PAMe / la is / WRONG/ L + H % / L+ H % / HL // (How many times must I tell you). By contrast, the only example of a similar Swinging-head type that I have discovered in French has the ‘inverse’ Iambic patterning [5]. This occurred in children’s let’s pretend games, where the children caricatured the French story-telling intonation(itself relatively sing-songy), in order to set the premise in their let’s pretend games, as in (7).below. 2. Super-trochees and stereotyped structures In spite of this rare example of a French swinging-head pattern, in the case of the onomatopoeic crow of the cockerel, where English speakers generally use the swinging head, French speakers once more resort to the chant. This seems to be the only way that the French speaker can escape from the constraints of equal syllable timing to produce the imitative sustained fall on the last syllable of the cockerel’s chant. The French open syllabic organisation [kokoriko] (kV$ kV$ r/lV$ kV$/) is common to most other Indo-European languages. The English trochaic patterning, on the other hand is quite distinct from other languages for which I can find a description. The impression of a sustained final fall, again results from the forced alignment of the final strong monosyllable with a complete trochaic foot. While the non final feet are regrouped into a super-trochee; and each trochee of this super-trochaic head is generally aligned with a repeated “L+ H%” contour, obtained by cascade dissimilation from the final “L %” juncture tone of the independent H* L + L% contour”. This shows to what extent even an onomatopoeia undergoes the rhythmic constraints of the language. This same super-trochaic pattern turns up again in the organisation of the London intensifier infixes. A well-known example of this comes from “My fair lady “, the musical film version of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, in which Eliza Doolittle uses the expression “abso-blooming-lutly”. The infixed intensifier must split the Head it modifies into plausible trochees, and the infixed expletive itself must be strictly trochaic. The forms in (9a, b, and c) are not possible; (10) is the only possible structure: 9. a) *Ab-blooming-solutely/, b) *Absolute-blooming-ly/, c) *Abso-damn-lutely, This is also the characteristic pattern of alliterative tonguetwisters. In “Peter Piper” (11), a binary super-trochaic pattern is forced on to all the non final binary feet; while the final pair of feet receives the inverse iambic pattern. It is this change in rhythm which marks off the final pair of feet (“peppers”). It follows on from this that the super-trochaic patterning (along with its dependant contour), marks the text to which it is associated as non-final. The Melodicity is again the result of a swinging-head derived by a complex cascade dissimilation from the final