Speech rhythm

Under rhythm refers to the temporal division of the spoken language . It results from the regular recurrence of movements of the respiratory muscles , which is expressed in the chronological sequence of stressed and unstressed syllables. The rhythm, together with the accent , the intonation , the speaking speed and the quantity, is one of the so-called suprasegmental characteristics of spoken language, also known as prosody .

The Rhythmics of Language in Phonetics and Linguistics

The isochronous hypothesis

Within the of the British Phoneticians A. Lloyd James (1940) for the first time in this form made distinction between accent counted and syllable-counting languages do you deal with the Isochrony - hypothesis assumes that in accent counting languages the time between two stressed syllables (with varying syllable length) in seems to be about the same length, while in the syllable-counting languages ​​the syllables (with varying stress intervals) seem to be about the same length.

The first two rhythmic classes were later supplemented by a third class, in which one assumes the always constant length of a mora .

The core idea of ​​this hypothesis is the assumption that there are equally long (isochronous) intervals of one kind or the other (rhythmic dichotomy ) in every language .

class	languages
Accent counters	English , Russian / Other Slavic , Arabic , German , Dutch , Danish , Thai , European Portuguese
Syllable counters	Spanish , French / Other Romance , Singapore Singlish English , Swiss German , Swedish , Norwegian , Brazilian Portuguese , Afrikaans
Mora counters	Japanese , Estonian , Sanskrit
Unclassified	Czech , Finnish , Tamil , Greek , Polish , Catalan , ...

The hypothesis of the physiological rhythm

The linguist and neurologist Eric Heinz Lenneberg formulated in his work Biological Fundamentals of Language (1967), among other things, the hypothesis of a physiological speech and language rhythm as a regular impulse of 160 plus or minus 20 milliseconds (i.e. about a sixth of a second), which the neuromuscular automatisms overall and thus also those of the language generation is based. (In the course of this he defined the syllable as a unit not of acoustic or linguistic, but physiological nature).

In Der Rhythmus der Rede: linguistic and literary aspects of language rhythm (1999), the literary scholar and linguist Hans Lösener cites an uncritical approach to the Platonic redefinition of the concept of rhythm as a criticism of the synonymous use of the terms rhythm and meter (Lenneberg's impulse). According to him, this concept of rhythm leads to a separation between rhythm and meaning and between metrics and semantics .

At the same time, he describes the rhythm theories' search for meter in language as being determined by the fascination it exerts on linguistics as the missing link between language and nature. In this context - the meter as the link between the linguistic and biological - he quotes Lenneberg as a representative of the rhythm of speech based on biological rhythms.

In fact, in Biological Foundations of Language , Lenneberg speaks quite arbitrarily of a regular impulse or beat to which the rhythmic structure is attached, then of a carrier impulse with modulations as a rhythm, and in the summary of the relevant statements of a rhythmic one Metric. These terms, which appear to have been treated equally, may in fact point to an uncritical adoption of the Platonic concept of rhythm. He also speaks of the basics of language as being in the physical nature of man. Some of his further explanations suggest, however, that the possibility of a mutual dependency of language from a linguistic and biological point of view is left open.

See also

• Weak and strong tone
• Speech expression

literature

• Andreas Dufter: Approaches to a rhythmological language typology . In: Sascha Brawer (Ed.): Proceedings 5. TaCos. Conference of Computational Linguistics Students, Saarbrücken, 25. – 28. May 1995 . University, Saarbrücken 1995, pp. 75-87.
• Otto von Essen : General and applied phonetics. 5th, revised and expanded edition. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1979, pp. 195–201.
• Eric H. Lenneberg : Biological Foundations of Language . John Wiley and Sons, New York 1967, ISBN 0-471-52626-6 , p. 489.
• Eric H. Lenneberg: Biological Foundations of Language . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1972, ISBN 3-518-27817-7 , p. 597.
• Hans Lösener: The rhythm of speech: linguistic and literary aspects of the rhythm of speech . Niemeyer, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-484-22059-7 , p. 251.
• Damaris Nübling / Renate Schrambke: syllable vs. Accent language features in Germanic languages ​​and in Alemannic . In: Elvira Glaser et al. (Ed.): Alemannic in a language comparison. Contributions to the 14th workshop for Alemannic dialectology . Stuttgart 2004 (= Journal for Dialectology and Linguistics, Supplements 129), pp. 281-320.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ coli.uni-saarland.de
2. ↑ Eric H. Lenneberg: Biological foundations of language . 3. Edition. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 3-518-27817-7 , p. 152.
3. ↑ Eric H. Lenneberg: Biological foundations of language . 3. Edition. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 3-518-27817-7 , p. 145.
4. ↑ Hans Lösener: The rhythm of speech: linguistic and literary aspects of the rhythm of speech. 1999, p. 81.
5. ↑ Hans Lösener: The rhythm of speech: linguistic and literary aspects of the rhythm of speech. 1999, p. 22.
6. ↑ Hans Lösener: The rhythm of speech: linguistic and literary aspects of the rhythm of speech. 1999, p. 81.
7. ↑ Eric H. Lenneberg: Biological foundations of language . 3. Edition. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 3-518-27817-7 , pp. 138-152.

Web links

Wiktionary: speech rhythm  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations