Please join us for a lecture from the linguistics department’s own Luc Baronian on
“The Metrics of Amédé Ardoin and its Implications on the French stress system”. On April 4th at 5pm in CAS 325
Abstract:
In this talk, I will use the principles of Generative Metrics (Halle & Keyser 1971, Kiparsky 1977) to present an analysis of the unusual metrical structure used by Amédé Ardoin, one of the earliest recorded Louisiana Creole singers of the 1920s and 1930s, in one of his most staple songs, Madame Atchen. The most intriguing aspect of the song
involves stress placed on syllables which do not normally receive stress in spoken French, yet its musicality is undeniable. I will show that if we assume Ardoin was using a combination of iambic and anapestic foot structure, his stress (mis)placements fall exactly on syllables that would normally receive secondary stress. The tension thus created between the expected linguistic stress and the musically delivered one generates a syncopated or off-beat pattern, typical of African music, which is however resolved at the end of lines or stanzas.
Besides the sociologically interesting conclusion that African rhythm has in fact influenced a local variety of French in its cultural manifestations, there are linguistic implications of this finding for French in general. First, there is no consensus as to whether or not French should be considered to have secondary stress. The intuitive use of the language by a naive Creole French speaker of the 1920s lends support to Noyer’s (2002) view that French has in fact an iambically structured prosody, although I will also argue for an optional anapestic one. In fact, I will show that it is possible to interpret the popularity of the French alexandrine verse with authors such as Beaudelaire himself as a consequence of the inherent structure of French metrics.