The role of phonological phrasing in sung and chanted verse

This article is a study of the metrics of sung and chanted verse, based on a data corpus of 670 English folksong lines, as well as chanted renditions of the corpus by ten native speaker consultants. Our theoretical focus is on the role of phonological phrasing in metrics. We find that in sung and chanted verse, an especially tight correspondence to the metrical pattern is imposed on linguistic material that is either bounded within a tight phrasal domain or located at the right edge of a high-level domain. These patterns have been observed earlier for spoken verse. But for the phenomenon of metrical inversion, the behavior of sung and chanted verse is quite different from spoken verse. We develop an explanation of the difference, based on the idea that inversion in sung and chanted verse occurs only in those cases where it is the best available metrical option. A further finding is that sung and chanted verse tends to match the number of beats alloted to a syllable to that syllable's natural linguistic duration. We suggest that the relevant measure of duration is phonetic, not phonological; and that the tendency to phonetic duration matching in sung and chanted verse has a categorial, phonologized analogue in the phenomenon of spoken-verse Resolution.