Abstract

Prosody is known in linguistics as the "suprasegmental" features of language such as syllable stress and intonation. It is also known in the fields of poetics and musicology with alternate definitions and modeling practices. Concepts of prosody are further compounded when considering prosodic phenomena throughout the languages of the world. While the resulting lack of a universal concept of prosody may be tolerable in such a variety of paradigms, there is one paradigm that requires a unified model of prosody. This is the paradigm of hymn translation, which requires prosodic features to align not only musically, poetically, and linguistically, but also cross-linguistically. This thesis compiles existing practices of prosodic modeling in all these areas as well as the prosodic phenomena of a hymn corpus in order to construct a unified model of prosody that can guide the alignment of prosodic features when translating hymns. Though principally designed for the practical purpose of hymn translation, this model also offers theoretical considerations for the definition, nature, and modeling of prosody.

Degree

College and Department

Humanities; Linguistics and English Language

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