PROSODIC STRESS IN THE THEORY OF RHYTHM BY HENRI MESHONNIK UNDER THE MAGNIFYING GLASS OF EXPERIMENTAL PHONETICS

Abstract

Henri Meschonnik’s legacy includes diversified, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary research. The history and theory of literature, philosophy and linguistics underlie his methodology for studying rhythm. To analyze the text, Meshonnik uses the stress system, in particular, the prosodic stress that occurs on the first syllable of a word when its first consonant is repeated in a verse or in a prosaic sentence. The existence of prosodic stress, which is understood in this way, is ignored by phoneticians. The stress in the text is presented in the theory of Madden as a symbolic display of a clot of energy, since initially stress in speech concentrates muscular effort. The article makes an attempt to determine what is the current status of prosodic stress, an important element of A. Meshonnik’s analytical apparatus. Stress has measurable acoustic parameters (intensity, pitch, duration), so an experiment was carried out (using a Praat speech analyzer). The stress on the first syllable in French phonetics is considered to be additional, depending on the individual implementation, however, Meshonnik, as well as his follower and co-author J. Desson, consider prosodic stress to be a linguistic (phonological) law. The article describes the stage of the experiment when native speakers (students of ENS Paris) were offered the phrase of Flaubert, commented by Madden and Desson in “Treatise on Rhythm”, and the same phrase, modified in two ways, to trace the stress in the absence of sound repetition. In the course of the experiment, most of the participants showed a slight increase in intensity when reading the original phrase, a decrease in intensity when reading a shortened phrase, and in some cases, the intensity increased when reading a phrase with a word modified to avoid repetitions.