Mari Lehtinen

University of Helsinki

2. spoken communication and prosody

Piano music and intonation contours in French speech - A comparative perspective

The aim of my paper is to provide a comparative study on the use of certain intonation contours in French speech and of similar note figures in piano music. My hypotheses are based on the comparison of the results of some prosodic studies that I have recently carried out (Lehtinen 2005a, Lehtinen 2005b) with my findings concerning the manifestations of similar phenomena in music scores composed for piano. My prosodic data come from two French radio broadcasts including speech of Sartre and Camus. The piano scores that I have studied are works of different well-known composers, such as Mozart, Bach and the Finnish 20th –century composer Merikanto. According to the prosodic studies that I have carried out, the degree of the information relevancy of what is said can be indicated with certain prosodic cues, such as different combinations of melodic upsteps and downsteps, rhythmic factors, salient absence of acoustic variations, etc. Certain phenomena seem to index a high degree of relevance and a strong personal commitment of the speaker, whereas some other features work to downplay the importance of what is said and to mark it as something obvious. In this paper, I provide examples and analyses through which I aim to show that figures with similar forms and functions can also be found in piano music. The methodological framework of my work mainly lies on conversation analysis. The contextualization theory of Gumperz also has a central role in my work; I namely consider that the intonation contours my studies are focussed on constitute ‘contextualization cues’ in the sense of Gumperz. My work is also methodologically influenced by the theories of several other authors (i.a. Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, Morel and Rossi) as well as by my own ideas concerning the framing of a message.

LEHTINEN, M. (2005a), L’utilisation des modulations intonatives comme « indices de contextualisation » dans un entretien radiodiffusé avec Jean-Paul Sartre – Quelques réflexions, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen CVI (à paraître en 2005)

LEHTINEN, M. (2005b), Transmission du degré de pertinence informative par des moyens prosodiques. Exemples de l’utilisation d’un schéma, Actes du symposium international IDP05 – Interface Discours Prosodie 2005 – Aix-en-Provence (France) (à paraître sur CD-ROM en 2005)