The Interface between Language and Music in Huju: Tone-Tune Relationship

This dissertation examines the interface between music and language in "Huju", which is a Shanghai dialect based regional opera. Chapter I is a short introduction. Chapter II presents a thorough review of the studies on linguistic tone and music tune, and provides descriptive background information about "Huju" and Shanghai dialect. Chapter III introduces the theory of prosodic phonology and its related studies on Shanghai dialect. Chapter IV presents a quantitative research on the mapping conditions via comparing the music melody and linguistic tone in "Huju" within the prosodic domains. Chapter V presents the linguistic Optimality Theory(OT) analysis to study about the music structure in "Huju" based on the Generative Theory of Tonal Music (GTTM). Chapter VI summarizes the findings and conclusions. This dissertation tries to solve the following questions: 1) Does music follow melody in tonal language or is there a mismatch between them? 2) If there is a mismatch between music and language, what causes such mismatch and how are music still be understood, and 3) What interface area can be studied between music and language? "Huju", as a dialectal opera with moderate tonal system of five tones, is the research subject. For the quantitative study, a metric, including melodic, syllabic and tonal tiers with tone-melody matching rules within prosodic units has been proposed. After analyzing through different prosodic domains, including Prosodic Word(PW), Clitic Group(CG), Phonological Phrase(PPh), Intonational Phrase(IP) and Foot(Ft), the results suggest that there is a high correspondence between music melody and language tone in "Huju", and the fewer tones a language has, there tends to be fewer possibilities to link tone and music melody. The OT analysis provides the comparison on the innate structure between music and language, and suggests that music resembles language from innate structure in certain ways with constraints. A discussion about the well-formedness and preference rule in music and language is also provided. This dissertation provides a new model of studying the tone-tune relationship in tonal language, and moreover, it is may fill in the gap in the interface studies between music and language in Chinese languages. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]