From speech to song: an interdisciplinary investigation of rhythm in English and Spanish

The general theoretical frame of this dissertation has to do with the study, from an interdisciplinary and interlinguistic point of view, of the typological dichotomy between stress-timed and syllable-timed languages, inasmuch as this distinction is valid at all. As a preliminary step, I carry out a comparative examination of the basic prosodic characteristics of English and Spanish, in order to then analyse the standard versification systems of these two languages. In the central part of my dissertation, I explore the most important text-setting Optimality Theory constraints as applied to a corpus of English and Spanish folk and art songs.My main objective in carrying out these three-level analyses is to check whether the actual setting of verse to music responds to some kind of underlying rhythmic constraints common to language prosody, verse prosody and music, and whether those constraints are ranked differently from language to language.The conclusions have to do with a correspondence between the timing typologies of language and the rhythmic typologies of music. I find clear inconsistencies or mismatches between speech prosody, on the one hand, and verse and music rhythm, on the other. These inconsistencies work differently in a syllabletimed language like Spanish than in a stress-timed language like English. While in the first type of languages I find a natural counterpoint or dialogue between speech prosody and musical rhythm, in the second type this counterpoint tends to be considered arhythmic. In other words, I establish a difference in kind in relation to the dialogue between prosody and music for each of the two types of languages. In English, the level of agreement between the two stress-patterns is really high, while in Spanish the counterpoint between the two patterns is used as an expressive device

Foundations of space biology and medicine. Volume 2, book 1: Ecological and physiological bases of space biology and medicine

Barometric pressure, gas composition, toxicity, and thermal exchange of spacecraft cabin atmospheres are discussed. Effects of gravitation, acceleration, weightlessness, noise, and vibration on human behavior and performance during space flight are also described

Mathematical linguistics

but in fact this is still an early draft, version 0.56, August 1 2001. Please d

Proceedings of the 2018 Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering (CSME) International Congress

Published proceedings of the 2018 Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering (CSME) International Congress, hosted by York University, 27-30 May 2018

Unmet goals of tracking: within-track heterogeneity of students' expectations for

Educational systems are often characterized by some form(s) of ability grouping, like tracking. Although substantial variation in the implementation of these practices exists, it is always the aim to improve teaching efficiency by creating homogeneous groups of students in terms of capabilities and performances as well as expected pathways. If students’ expected pathways (university, graduate school, or working) are in line with the goals of tracking, one might presume that these expectations are rather homogeneous within tracks and heterogeneous between tracks. In Flanders (the northern region of Belgium), the educational system consists of four tracks. Many students start out in the most prestigious, academic track. If they fail to gain the necessary credentials, they move to the less esteemed technical and vocational tracks. Therefore, the educational system has been called a 'cascade system'. We presume that this cascade system creates homogeneous expectations in the academic track, though heterogeneous expectations in the technical and vocational tracks. We use data from the International Study of City Youth (ISCY), gathered during the 2013-2014 school year from 2354 pupils of the tenth grade across 30 secondary schools in the city of Ghent, Flanders. Preliminary results suggest that the technical and vocational tracks show more heterogeneity in student’s expectations than the academic track. If tracking does not fulfill the desired goals in some tracks, tracking practices should be questioned as tracking occurs along social and ethnic lines, causing social inequality

Esa 12th Conference: Differences, Inequalities and Sociological Imagination: Abstract Book

Esa 12th Conference: Differences, Inequalities and Sociological Imagination: Abstract Boo