“Vocal form” as a music-phonetic speech genre: aspects of study

Vocal music is a form of existence and realization of a language. Primarily, it is oral speech of a specific type. Prosodic features of vocal music, as well as its rhythm and intonation, are formed as a result of direct music-language interaction. Therefore, intonational language-music correlation provides possibility of linguistic description of national vocal music and confirms the necessity to develop theoretical foundation for studying this issue. We consider vocal speech of any genre (song, aria or choral singing) in view of its prosodic features. Correspondingly, we consider intonational realization of a vocal text as related to distinctive features of intonation within phonetic system of a given language. In the present article, the authors term vocal-music speech phenomenon as a vocal form of a language, and specify the rationale that it could be related to elements of various levels of oral text. Several aspects of the vocal form are defined, namely phonatory, phonetic, rhythmic and intonational, and considered in the following branches of linguistics: phonostylistics, intonology and speech studies. The paper presents the concept of vocal form of a language within the research prospect. According to structure-based phonological approach, the vocal form as a music-language object is interpreted as a system component, its elements being defined as language units.