Laura McPherson

Laura McPherson will speak at the UC San Diego Linguistics Department on Monday April 21st at 2:00 p.m. over Zoom.

(In)comprehensibility of musical surrogate speech: An interplay of form and function

Abstract: Musical surrogate languages—the use of instruments to encode aspects of speech—are found all around the world, from the slit log manguareì of the Amazonian Bora to the plucked lute seperewa of the Ghanaian Akan. Most attested systems, deemed “abridging” by Stern (1957), encode phonemic aspects of the language, typically tone and rhythm, though the transparency of this encoding can vary drastically from one tradition to another, and even from one mode of playing to the next. This talk explores the relationship between the form a surrogate language takes and its function: In what contexts is comprehensibility promoted, and when is the ambiguity and incomprehensibility of a system exploited or enhanced? How is the relationship between language and surrogate speech affected by instrumental and cultural constraints? We examine strategies used to adapt surrogate speech to different registers, and the resulting effect on the structure of the surrogate signal. These strategies showcase an impressive degree of metalinguistic knowledge, which musical surrogate practitioners creatively tap into to modulate the comprehensibility of their message.