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The linguistic analysis of North American Indian songs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

G. L. Bursill-Hall
G. L. Bursill-Hall*
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University
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Summary

This paper attempts to extend a theory of description for songs belonging to non-literate societies; this theory was first described by R. H. Robins, of the Department of Linguistics of the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London and a former colleague of the late J. R. Firth. The author has tried to develop the theory a little further and has applied it to the analysis of two Haida love songs.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , Fall 1964 , pp. 15 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1964

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References

1 Financial assistance towards this project received from the Canada Council, the University of British Columbia, and the American Council of Learned Societies, is hereby gratefully acknowledged.

2 Sapir, E., “The Phonetics of Haida,” IJAL 2 (1923), pp. 143–58 Google Scholar.

3 Firth, J. R., “A Synopsis of Linguistic Theory,” Studies in Linguistic Analysis (1957), p. 8 Google Scholar.

4 For studies by North American scholars, practitioners of theories currently in vogue in North America, who have tried to relate Firth’s work to their own, see Hill, A. A., “Suprasegmentals, prosodies, prosodemes,” Language 37 (1961), pp. 457–68 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pike, K. L., Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behaviour (Glendale, 1954–55).Google Scholar

5 Firth, J. R., “Atlantic Linguistics,” Papers in Linguistics (1957), p. 167 Google Scholar.

6 Sapir, E., “Representative Music,” The Musical Quarterly 4 (1918), pp. 161–67 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “The Musical Foundations of Verse,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 20 (1921), pp. 213–28 Google Scholar.

7 Hockett, C. F., “Componential Analysis of Sierra Popoluca,” IJAL 13 (1947), 258–67 Google Scholar. I am indebted to Professor G. H. Fairbanks of Cornell University for drawing this important article to my attention.

8 Firth, J. R., “Sounds and Prosodies,” Papers in Linguistics, p. 128 Google Scholar, and “Modes of Meaning,” Papers in Linguistics, p. 191.

Firth was merely programmatic in his references to the similarities between linguistic and musical analysis; Hockett, on the other hand, suggests much more of an analogy between musical and linguistic analysis and sketches an analytical scheme of language description using features of linguistic and musical description.

It is indeed possible to suggest lines of similarity between musical and linguistic analysis. The harmonic in music can be equated to the distinctive features at the phonological level and morphological features at the grammatical level; the contrapuntal equates to phonotactic and prosodic features in phonology and to syntactic features in grammar, and the contextual is the musical equivalent of the linguistic context of situation and features such as collocations, ordered series, and specific markers—e.g. the E b Major chord of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony and the collocations of some of the English words for the months.

9 Firth, , “Modes,” p. 192 Google Scholar.

10 Robins, R. H. and McLeod, Norma, “Five Yurok Songs: A Musical and Textual Analysis,” BSOAS 18 (1956), pp. 592–609 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robins, R. H. and McLeod, Norma, “A Yurok Song without Words,” BSOAS 20 (1957), pp. 501–6 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Robins, and McLeod, , “Five Yurok Songs,” pp. 592–605 Google Scholar.

12 Ibid., p. 592.

13 Firth, , “Synopsis,” p. 7 Google Scholar.

14 Firth, , “Modes,” p. 192 Google Scholar; Firth, J. R., “The Techniques of Semantics,” Papers in Linguistics, pp. 24–27 Google Scholar.

15 Sapir stated that his informant, Rev. Dr. P. R. Kelly, was “too much occupied to give me more than a few hours”; Dr. Kelly, who now lives in retirement at Nanaimo, B.C., confirms this, and so far as he can remember, he spent only a couple of afternoons with Sapir.

16 I am indebted to my son, Damian Bursill-Hall, who was responsible for all the musical notation and transcription of these and other Haida songs.

17 Robins and McLeod, “Fire Yurok Songs.”

18 Robins, and McLeod, , “A Yurok Song,” p. 505 Google Scholar.

19 Sapir, E., “Phonetics,” p. 151 Google Scholar.

20 Firth, , “Modes,” p. 190 Google Scholar et seq.

21 Firth, , “Synopsis,” pp. 15–16 Google Scholar; Bursill-Hall, G. L., “The Linguistic Theories of J. R. Firth,” Thought (1960), pp. 245–46 Google Scholar; Bursill-Hall, G. L., “Levels Analysis: J. R. Firth’s Theories of Linguistic Analysis,” JCLA 6 (1960-61), p. 133 Google Scholar; Halliday, M. A. K., “Categories of the Theory of Grammar,” Word 17 (1961), pp. 270–72 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 The singer was Mrs. Susan Williams of Skidegate.

23 Robins, and McLeod, , “Five Yurok Songs,” p. 593 Google Scholar.

24 Ibid., pp. 594 et seq.

25 Sapir, , “Phonetics,” p. 154 Google Scholar.

26 Jones, D., An Outline of English Phonetics (London, 1956), p. 31 Google Scholar.

27 Robins, R. H., “Aspects of Prosodic Analysis,” Proceedings of the University of Durham Philosophical Society 1 (1957), 1–12 Google Scholar; Bursill-Hall, , “Levels Analysis,” pp. 171–73 Google Scholar.

28 Bazell, C. E., Linguistic Form (Istanbul, 1953), pp. 33–35 Google Scholar; Bazell, C. E., “The Fundamental Syntactic Relations,” Časopis pro Moderní Filologii 33 (1950), 9–15 Google Scholar.

29 These remarks about the grammar of Haida must be regarded as tentative and have been made to illustrate the type of analysis to be made and its place in the description of the songs.

30 Robins, and McLeod, , “Five Yurok Songs,” p. 595 Google Scholar.

31 Bazell, , Linguistic Form, pp. 35–36 Google Scholar.

32 Capital letters represent text-music phrases, and the tie-lines link repetitions, thus making of them phrase classes.

33 One version was sung by Mr. Henry Young and Mrs. Susan Williams, both of Skidegate; the other version was sung by Mrs. Victoria Edgars of Masset.

34 Firth, , “Synopsis,” p. 13 Google Scholar; Simon, , “Two Substantive Complexes in Standard Chinese,” BSOAS 15 (1953), pp. 327–55 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Firth, , “Synopsis,” p. 8 Google Scholar.

36 Robins, R. H., “General Linguistics in Great Britain, 1930-1960,” Trends in Modern Linguistics (1962), p. 14 Google Scholar.