Phonological processes in maintaining rhythm in Racionais MCs raps: Linguistic and musical prominences

• Grant number: 23/17071-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: July 01, 2024
• End date: December 31, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Gladis Massini-Cagliari
• Grantee: Raiane dos Anjos Pereira
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Araraquara. Araraquara , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This Project aims to analyse the relations between musical and linguistic rhythm (henceforth, between music and lyrics), focusing on the matchings and mismatchings between prominences in both musical and linguistic levels. The corpus is composed by Racionais MC's' raps, specifically from the album "Sobrevivendo no Inferno", Cosa Nostra, 1997. Phonological processes which operate over the lyrics, to create rhythmic effects relating to musical rhythm, concerning to the organization of musical and linguistic prominences, will also be focused.This proposal is based on the hypothesis that musical prominences preferably combine with linguistic prominences. Despite that, there is the possibility of musical prominences to be occupied by syllables that do not correspond to linguistic prominences (at least, not primary prominences). There also occur phonological processes which operate rhythmic adjustments, to "adequate" linguistic rhythm to the musical beat. Although there is the possibility of non-coincidence between prominences in the song and in the text, this cannot happen in the majority of the cases, being restrict to a marginal stylistic usage, because, on the contrary way, there would not be the possibility of production and recognition of a rhythmic pattern, as soon as poetic and musical rhythmic patterns are based on structure repetition. Being so, testing this hypothesis, this research aims to verify the contributions that the analysis of musical rhythm can bring to the understanding of linguistic rhythm - mediated by the poetic dimension, in the case of song lyrics. In this sense, the main objective is to investigate how the relationship between rhythmic prominences in the three dimensions involved (song, poem, and text) work out.