Natural Language Semantics and Music (OFAI Lecture by Winfried Lechner)
Channel: Austrian Research Institute for AI (OFAI)
Date: 13/03/2023

Natural Language Semantics and Music
Prof. Mag. Phil. Winfried Lechner, PhD, University of Athens
08 March 2023

Both human language and music can be modeled as discrete, combinatorial systems. Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983) demonstrated that applying the methods of formal linguistics to the study of (tonal) music provides a strategy for exposing homologies between these two systems. But while syntactic properties of music have attracted a considerable amount of interest (Rohrmeier 2011; Granroth-Wilding and Steedman 2014; see Rohrmeier & Pearce 2018 for an survey), meaning-related aspects have by and large remained understudied (an exception is Schlenker 2019, 2022). In part, this might be due to the widely held belief that unlike natural language, music neither has a lexicon of atomic form-meaning pairs (Katz and Pesetsky 2011) nor employs compositional mechanisms to recursively derive complex meanings. I will explore some consequences of these two assumptions by making explicit what they entail for the study of music from a linguistic perspective.