Abstract
A rather particularized comparison between tonal music and natural languages is pursued, in order to show commonalities and divergences of tonal music with ordinary languages and, as a consequence, to evaluate its rootedness in the human language faculty. The aim of this examination is not that of answering to the question ‘is music a language?’. The goal is rather to scrutiny the issue of the undoubted relevant structural features tonal music shares with verbal languages considered in general, in their ‘universal’ aspects. The comparison is performed mainly on syntax, and only sketched for the semantics of tonal music, widely considered as, at least, vague and hard to formally characterize. In the conclusion, some arguments are provided to display a wider foundation of tonal music in the human ‘language-ready’ brain, as well as in the basic temporal cognitive units underpinning the developmental construction of social cognition.
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