Rhythm 2.1. Introduction

In the foregoing chapter we have seen that language and music have similar kinds of structures and processes, both at the level of phrasing and at the rhythmic level. The remainder of this dissertation is about phrasing and rhythm phenomena in speech, while we keep musical phrasing and rhythm as the background motivation for several speech phenomena. The current chapter gives a (non-exhaustive) overview of the literature on rhythm, and provides the background information for both Chapter 3 on rhythm in fast speech, and Chapter 4 on recursive prosodic phrasing. We do not intend to contribute to the theoretical discussions involved in the rhythmic issues discussed in this chapter. The issues discussed are the following: in the first section we will describe what rhythm is. In the second section we will make the distinction between rhythm and meter. Section 2.3 shows that languages differ as to how their rhythm units are classified. Section 2.4 describes some variable rhythm patterns in speech, and the rules that seem to play a role in this variability. In section 2.5 we will point out that time is a major factor in rhythmic patterns, which also will turn out to be the core explanation for our observations in Chapter 3. Firstly, we will answer the question " what is rhythm? ". Rhythm is everywhere, in the world within us and in the world around us. Rhythm is in our heartbeat, our breathing, and our stride, but also in the tides of the sea, the seasons and the movements of the earth itself. These are all movements in a rhythmic fashion. It turns out to be really hard to do things non-rhythmically: when people are asked to tap their fingers on the table irregularly, some recurrent pattern will appear (Fraisse 1982). This all suggests that rhythm is at the heart of nature, at least in natural events in which time,