Beats in Time across Music and Language

The timing of acoustic events in relation to different levels of structure building is a fundamental task in both language and music. While in music the timing of sounds and their relation to an abstract metrical grid is often used to create aesthetic effects, timing relations in language are commonly grammaticalized for the conventional construction of different levels of meaning, leaving only a narrow margin for rhythmic preferences of other sorts. Our chapter reviews functions of timing, and, specifically, metrical structure, in both music and language, suggests a unified form of representation inspired by autosegmental-metrical phonology and thereby directs the attention to principles of time-related structure building that are relevant for both communicative sound systems.