Delivery design: towards a typology

Jakobson 1960 distinguishes between verse design and delivery design. ‘Verse design’ refers to features such as meter that are intrinsic to a text and remain invariant regardless of how the text is delivered (recited, chanted, sung, etc.). ‘Delivery design’, on the other hand, refers to conventions that regulate the performance of a text or group of texts. The melody of songs is an instance of delivery design.

Performance conventions may impose constraints of their own on the structure of texts, and in some cases it is difficult to tease apart textual regularities that are due to verse design from those that are consequences of performance conventions.

Surveying the world’s poetic traditions, much more is known about how verse design may vary from one tradition to the next than about performance conventions. I will present preliminary work towards a classification of the performance conventions that are found around the world, based on the extent to which they control pitch and timing.