Artistic Recitation of Metered Speech

15

what criteria. When you listen to the second "I", you have a feeling that its pitch curve remains somehow "half way", strongly indicating that some continuation is to come. Thus, the rising pitch and amplitude curves are overdetermined.
Finally, let us have a close look at the last two lines of excerpt 2.

unlesstospymyshadowin ðe sunandisc anton mineown def ormity Figure 10Wave plot of "Unless to spy my shadow in the sun an(d) / descant on
mine own deformity". Notice that "sunan(d)" is pronounced as a unit, and
is followed by a minute pause.

In this excerpt, one complex sentence is running through four lines. At the end of line 1, the syntax is incomplete, and a sequel is strongly expected. At the end of lines 2 and 3 no such incompleteness is perceived. Nonetheless, there is a feeling that the transition from line 3 to 4 is rather hasty. This is warranted neither by versification, nor by ordinary speech. In ordinary speech, we would expect the speaker to separate "And" from the preceding "sun", and run it into the ensuing "descant", pronouncing the two words with a single, shared [d]. In a rhythmical performance, the line boundary after "sun" would encourage such a separation. Here, on the contrary, the performer pronounces the two words sunan("sun and") with no measurable pause between them, and further binds them together with one common intonation contour; there is no trace of the word-final [d] (what is quite common in "ordinary" speech). While in the other three lines in this excerpt the last syllable of each line as well as the word-final phoneme is conspicuously lengthened, the word sunas well as its closing phoneme are relatively short. What is more, the speaker inserts a minute 0.066 msec pause after sunan.We have said enough about such brief pauses to expect (what is, indeed, the case) that it would not be perceived as a pause, but as an articulatory gesture, overarticulating the ensuing [d].

unle ss Figure 11

tos

py

m

y

sh

a

dow inðe

s

u

n

a

n

Wave plot and pitch contour of ""Unless to spy my shadow in the sunan(d)"

This deviation from both ordinary speech and versification appears to have rhetorical reasons. Descantis unusually foregrounded in this reading. As will be readily seen in figure 12, pitch resets high on de-, and then falls on -cant.In the wave plot we may observe that both