prosody

prosody (ENG N) From a Greek word denoting a sung poem, the art of setting words to music with careful attention to the metrical accentuation of the words, and a corresponding setting in the music. As French is said to have no strong metrical accent (compared to Italian, German, or even English), the number of musical choices for a line of text is potentially greater than in those other languages. Some obvious »sins« of prosody would include: the setting of the final unaccented syllable of a…