The Identity Thesis for Language and Music

This paper presents and defends the following hypothesis about language and tonal music: All formal differences between language and music are a consequence of differences in their fundamental building blocks. In all other respects, language and music are identical. Extending and adapting Lerdahl and Jackendoff's (1983, GTTM) model of musical structure, we argue that music, like language, contains a syntactic component in which headed structures are built by iterated, recursive, binary Merge. This is the component that GTTM called Prolongational Reduction, which represents hierarchical patterns of tension and relaxation in tonal harmony. We further argue that the distinct component that GTTM calls Time Span Reduction is a musical prosodic component (a point anticipated by GTTM itself), whose interface with the syntactic component is strikingly similar to the comparable interface in language. Though we take GTTM as a starting point and touchstone throughout, at the heart of our proposal is a significant realignment of the GTTM model that allows us to ask several new questions. For example: is Internal Merge (i.e. syntactic movement) found in musical syntactic structure? We argue that Internal Merge is indeed found in music, and is exemplified by the phenomenon called the perfect cadence. In particular, we argue that the perfect cadence displays a clustering of properties identical to those associated with Head Movement in language. Building on this analysis, we argue that the output of musical syntax feeds a Tonal-Harmonic Component whose formal relation to musical syntax parallels that between linguistic syntax and semantic systems. "Etoit-il étonnant que les premiers Grammairiens soumissent leur art à la Musique, & fussent à la fois professeurs de l'un & de l'autre?" Rousseau, Essai sur l'origine des langues