Prosodic analysis of urban music in French and Czech

in English TITLE : Prosodic Analysis of Urban Music in French and Czech AUTHOR : Mgr. Polina Chodaková DEPARTMENT : Institute of Romance Studies FF UK SUPERVISORS : doc. PhDr. Tomáš Duběda, Ph.D., prof. Philippe Martin, Dr ès Sci, Dr Ling. KEY WORDS : Prosody, metrics, stress, intonation, declamation, rap, reggae This thesis deals with the rhythm, stress and intonation in rap and reggae music. It describes the form features of declamations which combine chant, half- singing and singing, in the theoretical framework of contrastive prosody and verse theory. The thesis consists of seven chapters and is based on a textual corpus of 200 songs in French and Czech, assembled for this dissertation. The linguistic material of 59,000 syllables is a representative set of excerpts, transcribed in rhythmic grids with an auditive analysis. From the prosodic point of view, rap and reggae display an important degree of rhythmic reorganisation. In both languages, setting texts to music is performed ac- cording to an isochronous pattern, which is imposed on the lyrics with an isosyllabic rhythm and whose bound stress system is weak. This is shown through interactive constraints, which reflect universal tendencies in verbal art, that both genres exhibit a lot of freedom in the association of lyrics and the musical..