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

Linguistic features like 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 component 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 and tone-melody correspondence. Functional load of tones and degrees of tone-melody correspondence were obtained for three languages that use pitch contrastively: Cantonese, Mandarin, and Japanese. It was found that the functional load of tones and degree of tone-melody correspondence in these three languages did not correlate. Since Cantonese and Japanese alone exhibit the correlation, reasons for why Mandarin breaks the possible pattern are discussed. This study is a look into how linguistic grammar and experience interacts with musical grammar in a behavior that simultaneously involves language and music.