Prosodic structure of the foxtrot
Date
2018-04-30
Authors
Richards, Matthew
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Abstract
Language is a common metaphor used to describe dance and how people understand, observe, dance and relate to dances. This metaphor implies that dance has a communicative aspect between people and there is a structure to the patterns found in the dance. The pattern of interest in language is the pattern of articulation of sounds. The dance investigated in this thesis is the Foxtrot, a partner dance, with a view to examining how the structure of this dance is articulated using theories from oral language phonology and sign language phonology. In particular it looks at sonority and prosodic units in sign language and how they apply to dance. The research questions are: (1) Can sonority be defined for dance and used in the analysis of dance steps, and (2) Can dance steps be organized into prosodic units?
This thesis makes the following arguments: Dance has a sonority based on the articulators used to articulate the dance step. The steps are structured around the sonority of the articulators used in the step. In the Foxtrot sonority is defined by the proximity of the articulators to the centre of mass of the dancer. The closer to the centre of mass the more sonorous the movement. The most sonorous movements start the step while following movements are less sonorous. This pattern is repeated with the other prosodic unit of the foot, where the most prominent step starts the foot. The conclusion is that theories from phonology can be applied to the Foxtrot and may be able to be extended to other types of dance.
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Keywords
Foxtrot, ASL, linguistics, phonology, prosodic structure, partner dance