Musical syntax: Difference between revisions

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Syntax in general can be referred to as a study of the principles and rules needed for the construction of a language or as a term in particular describing these principles and rules for a special language.
 
===Linguistic Syntaxsyntax – three principles <ref name=Patel2008>Patel, A.D. (2008). Music, Language, and the Brain. Oxford University Press, USA</ref>===
Linguistic syntax is especially marked by its structural richness which becomes apparent in its multi layered organization as well as in the strong relationship between syntax and meaning. That is that there are special linguistic syntactic principles which define how the language is formed out of different subunits, such as words out of [[morphemes]], phrases out of words and sentences out of phrases. Furthermore, linguistic syntax is featured by the fact that a word can take on abstract [[grammatical functions]] which are less defined through properties of the word itself but through the context and structural relations. This is for example that every [[noun]] can be used as a [[subject (grammar)|subject]], [[object (grammar)|object]] or [[indirect object]], but without a sentence as the normal context of a word, no statement about its [[grammatical function]] can be made. At last, linguistic syntax is marked by abstractness. This means that only conventional structural relations and not psychoacoustic relationships are the basis for the linguistic syntax.
 
===Musical Syntaxsyntax <ref name=Patel2008/>===
Concerning musical syntax these three aspects of richness in linguistic syntax as well as the abstractness should be found in music too, if one wants to claim that music has a comparable syntax. An annotation that has to be made concerns the fact that most of the studies dealing with musical syntax are confined to the consideration of Western European tonal music. Thus this article can also only focus on [[Western tonal music]].