Rhythm is in the mind of the beholder. Remarks on the nature of linguistic rhythm

• Authors: Mołczanow Janina , Wiese Richard

Title variants

PL

Rytm tkwi w umyśle. Uwagi na temat rytmu w języku

• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The aim of the present article is to provide a review and a critical assessment of current approaches to linguistic rhythm. At the perceptual level, languages are perceived to fall into three rhythmic groups: stress-timed, syllable-timed, and mora-timed. In stress-timed languages, stressed syllables are thought to occur at regular intervals of time, whereas in syllable-timed and mora-timed languages, syllables and moras are isochronous. Though numerous phonetic studies failed to confirm the objective existence of isochrony, there is ample evidence that rhythm plays a central role in language processing and that different languages have different underlying rhythmic structure. We argue that phonetically-based models which treat rhythm as an emergent property are insufficient to account for cross-linguistic variation and that the intuitive notion of rhythm should be explicitly modelled by drawing upon the concepts of a phonological theory.

Keywords

EN

phonetics; phonology; prosodic structure; rhythm

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika w Toruniu. Wydawnictwo UMK
• Journal: Linguistica Copernicana
• Year: 2014
• Issue: 11
• Pages: 169-182

Contributors

author

Mołczanow Janina

• Uniwersytet Warszawski, Instytut Lingwistyki Stosowanej

author

Wiese Richard

• Philipps-Universität Marburg, Institut für Germanistische Sprachwissenschaft