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Reviewed by:
  • Poetic meter and musical form in Tashlhiyt Berber songs
  • John Halle
Poetic meter and musical form in Tashlhiyt Berber songs. By François Dell and Mohamed Elmedlaoui. (Berber studies 19.) Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe, 2008. Pp. viii, 274. ISBN 9783896453983. €44.80.

While remaining somewhat peripheral within linguistics, generative metrics (GM) has in recent years seen a mild resurgence of interest reflected in the publication of Fabb & Halle 2008; two substantial conference volumes, Dresher & Friedberg 2006 and Aroui & Arleo 2009; and articles and reviews by Duanmu (2004), Deo (2007), Dell (2009), and Kiparsky (2009). These complement somewhat earlier articles by Hayes and Kaun (1996) and Hayes and MacEachern (1998), which have turned out to be influential. While it is premature to refer to a second generation of GM, this work as a whole can be seen as marking certain shifts in empirical focus and theoretical orientation differentiating it in important respects from foundational studies of the 1970s.

The focus in this review is to identify those aspects of Dell and Elmedlaoui’s Poetic meter and musical form in Tashlhiyt Berber songs that are indicative of this shift. It should be recognized that all of these studies are in an important sense orthodox in maintaining the core assumption of GM: the competence of those participating in a metrical idiom. At the same time, Poetic meter requires that metrical competence is understood somewhat more broadly than in traditional GM, for D&E’s core data do not derive from a familiar poetic form (such as Shakespearean iambic pentameter) but from a relatively exotic musical idiom: Tashlhiyt Berber song (TBS). The term ‘metrical form’—a fundamental component of the abstract, internalized structure of language or in poetry—is now required to be understood additionally in a musical sense, namely as the ‘meter’ that is applicable to the externalized rhythmic structure of musical sequences, as they are performed and/or exist as notated musical scores. These two distinct senses of the term ‘meter’, which I refer to as textual meter and musical meter respectively, are very easily confused. Among the important contributions of Poetic meter is the identification of some of the basis of this confusion, although certain questions having to do with their interaction are also raised by D&E’s analysis.

In this review I first provide a brief introduction to the TBS idiom and to the descriptive apparatus adopted by D&E to represent salient aspects of each type of metrical structure. I then outline their theoretical approach with respect to foot and line structure, and discuss the broader significance of these results with respect to other, more familiar metrical idioms.

Even in an era of widespread dissemination of previously obscure ethnic and national musical traditions via the ‘world music’ genre, TBS is likely to appear at least somewhat exotic when readers encounter it on the CD-ROM included with the volume. This is partly due to musical factors [End Page 181] such as unfamiliar instrumental ensembles, nonwestern tunings, and the distinctive timbre of the vocalists and vocal ensembles. Related to the latter is an additional source of exoticism in the Tashlhiyt Berber language, namely nonsonorant syllabic nuclei within TBS (153–76), the discussion of which is beyond the scope of this review.

In negotiating TBS, D&E adopt a basic premise argued for in Dell & Halle 2009, which is to view what is informally referred to as a song as a composite object created from the interaction of two independent structures, a text and a tune. It follows that a formal description of the TBS idiom implicates the relevant properties of two distinct objects: (i) musical—the independent phrasal, accentual, and rhythmic patterns created by sequences of notes, and (ii) linguistic—the phonological, morphological, and syntactic properties of the text assigned to the tune.

Since conventional and musical literacy is rare among Tashlhiyt Berber speakers and musical literacy virtually unheard of among Tashlhiyt Berber musicians (24), the core data require the importation of two external notational systems. For the phonemic features of Tashlhiyt Berber, D&E adopt a slightly fortified variant of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) with additional symbols representing clitic group and morphosyntactic boundaries, the...

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