Proceedings

A Cross-linguistic Investigation on the Correlation between Functional Load of Tone and Tone-Melody Correspondence

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Abstract

Linguistic features such as stress and tone are often reflected in how lyrics are set to music. Intuitively, the motivation behind this phenomenon is to ensure listeners can accurately understand the lyrics in a musical environment, which begs the question: If a phonological contrast is more useful for accurately understanding speech in a language, then is it more likely to be reflected in text-setting? This study explores this question, focusing on tone-melody correspondence. The functional load of tones and the degree of tone-melody correspondence were obtained for five languages that use pitch contrastively: Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Thai, and Vietnamese. It was found that the functional load of tones and the degree of tone-melody correspondence in these five languages do suggest a correlation, inviting further investigation into whether other linguistic features also follow this pattern. More broadly, this finding can serve as additional evidence for the speech production process having access to some level of lexical knowledge, such as the functional load of phonological contrasts, and that listener-oriented communicative pressures may be a key motivating factor in the use of this knowledge.

Keywords: Text-setting, Tone, Functional load

How to Cite:

Taniguchi, N., (2026) “A Cross-linguistic Investigation on the Correlation between Functional Load of Tone and Tone-Melody Correspondence”, Proceedings of the Annual Meetings on Phonology 2(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/amphonology.3700