About

The connection between music and language has intrigued thinkers for millennia. Musical forms are said to resemble linguistic ones in structure, meaning and sound. Thus far, however, studies investigating this connection are relatively rare: in accounts of prosody – ‘the music of speech’ – it is downplayed in favour of formal phonological analyses. This project uses this connection as a starting point for an interdisciplinary account to analyse musical and prosodic perception, using two harmonious notions from the study of, on the one hand, musicology and, on the other, pragmatics: expectation and effort.

Music-psychologists suggest that emotional responses to music depend on whether a listener’s expectations are satisfied or violated: certain notes feel that they inevitably lead to others, whereas a surprising leap demands extra attention (Huron 2006). Relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1986/95) is a pragmatic theory of interpretation which posits that humans are always seeking relevance. Speakers therefore aim to make their communication-acts relevant and hearers expect they will be relevant enough to be worth processing: if greater processing effort is required, it should generate additional communicative effects. According to relevance theory, unexpected prosodic contours will require additional effort from the hearer and prompt the search for different meaning.

Following work on variations in processing effort (Fabb 2022), I suggest that this relevance-theoretic account applies to speech because it stems from a more general principle involved in musical processing. Integrating underlying cross-domain mechanisms would enable theories of musical processing to inform work in linguistic pragmatics (and vice versa). Emotion, in particular, is central to musicology and I consider how such work can inform this underdeveloped area of pragmatics. These parallels between theories of musicology and pragmatics are ripe for exploration, and we should aim to integrate frameworks in which expectation and processing effort elicits emotion and communicative effects.