Anacrusis
Anacrusis is one of those few terms that is shared between musicology and linguistics. The word derives from the Greek meaning an “up-stroke” (Oxford English Dictionary, 1989, s.v. anacrusis). Musically, an anacrusis has been described as “[o]ne or more notes preceding the first metrically strong beat of a phrase; upbeat, pickup.” (Randel, 1986, s.v. Anacrusis) Linguistically, the term has similarly been used to refer to a series of unaccented syllables at the beginning of a stretch of speech, normally uttered with a quickened tempo (Chafe, 1994, p. 59; Cruttenden, 1996, p. 21; Du Bois, Cumming, Schuetze-Coburn, & Paolino, 1992, p. 100). It is an open but empirically testable question whether or not anacrusis in music is normally characterized by this same quickening of tempo.
References
Chafe, W. (1994). Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: The flow and displacement of conscious experience in speaking and writing. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.
Cruttenden, A. (1996). Intonation, 2nd Ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Du Bois, J., Cumming, S., Schuetze-Coburn, S. & Paolino, D., Eds. (1992). Santa Barbara Papers in Linguistics, v. 4: Discourse Transcription. Santa Barbara: University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Linguistics.
Randel, D. (1986). New Harvard Dictionary of Music. Cambridge, MA & London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
