Submitted by tomski on 27 November, 2019 - 08:02.
WA Friday Lunch Talks are monthly meetings with presentations of current research results or research in progress by WA faculty, staff, or PhD students. Each talk is of 45 minutes (+15 minutes for discussion). We welcome all to a talk "The role of rhythm in language and music" by Prof. Dr. Richard Wiese, University of Marburg (Friday, Nov 29, 13:15-14:15, Sala Górna, Coll. Heliodori).
Prof. Dr. Richard Wiese
Institut für Germanistische Sprachwissenschaft
Philipps-Universität Marburg
The role of rhythm in language and music
ABSTRACT
Rhythm is a phenomenon which is obviously present for both language and music. Couched in more recent neurocognitive terms, rhythm is part of the predictive structure for language as well as for music. However, it is unclear whether the term “rhythm” has the same meaning in these two domains, and both musicologists and cognitive scientists have disputed this. In the present contribution, I argue that there are central aspects of rhythm which are shared between language and music. Empirical evidence comes from a series of studies (corpus-based and experimental) demonstrating that regular alternation is preferred in the perception of language, making rhythm in language closer to rhythm in music than sometimes thought.
Prof. Dr Richard Wiese is a phonologist from the University of Marburg in Germany. His research scope is broad: apart from phonology his research has also embraced morphology, psycholinguistics and orthography. He is the author of several books on phonology and numerous high impact-factor papers on languages such as German, English, Polish, Chinese, Turkish and Arabic. His most recent intrerest are focued on rhythm (and music).
