Are our concepts from prosodic typology, like word stress, pitch accent, head-/edge-prominence, really that tightly linked to individual languages? How are meanings often signaled via intonation in European languages, like information structure and sentence type, expressed in communicative acts between speakers who are bilingual in such a European language, Spanish, and one in which many of these meanings are expressed by morphology, Quechua? Based on semi-spontaneous dialogical elicitation data in both Spanish and Quechua gathered via fieldwork in the bilingual community of Huari, Peru, this work provides some challenging answers to these questions. Besides being the first detailed description of the prosody of a Central Quechuan language, it provides an in-depth study of the intonational systems and prosodic structures of the two languages and shows that their variation spaces overlap to a large extent, in turns exhibiting or not exhibiting evidence of word stress, pitch accents, lexical pitch accents in loanwords, and head- or edge-prominence.

Languages differ regarding both the ways they group words into phrases and the surface cues they use to indicate relevant phrasing patterns. Modeling intonation in as many languages as possible has become a central goal of theoretical and empirical linguistics. However, intonational research has only recently begun to devote attention to the analysis of spontaneous speech, one of the central issues of this book. The volume contains eight contributions by international scholars, some of them members of the Research Center on “Multilingualism” (Hamburg, Germany), all of them experts on intonation and most also on multilingualism. A central goal of the present volume is to expand the cross-linguistic and multilingual perspective of phrasing, focusing thereby on languages from the Romance and Germanic families, among them Catalan, French, German, Italian, Occitan, and Spanish. Within Spanish, special attention is given to several Argentinean varieties, and within Italian, the Neapolitan variety is compared with the standard one.

The study employs an autosegmental-metrical model of intonation to propose an intonational grammar of Swabian and Upper Saxon German, respectively. The analysis is guided by the assumption that each dialect exhibits a specific distinct intonation. The phonological analysis is comparative in nature: the implementation of accents are compared between the dialects in terms of tonal alignment and excursion. In fact, the phonetic data present evidence for the phonological analysis in that the individual tonal categories differ significantly from each other. In addition, a functional analysis of the intonation contours provides further evidence for the phonological analysis. Based on the assumption that nuclear contours convey intonational meaning, these meanings are analysed and compared. A certain meaning can be attributed to intonation contours that differ phonologically between the two dialects. However, the general shape of contours and its association with meaning has been proved to be identical in the two dialects and compared to a similar analysis of intonational meaning of British English. This comprehensive study of dialect intonation contributes to improve our understanding of intonational phonology.

English sentence prosody provides cues to both focus structure and speaker attitude. Taking the phonological model of intonation developed by Pierrehumbert (1880 et seq.) as point of departure, this work illuminates the communicative function of English pitch contours by (1) giving a detailed survey of phrase-final contours found in statements and questions, and (2) investigating what attitudinal features determine choice of phrasal tones in these utterance types. This comprehensive study will be of interest to linguists in a number of fields, ranging from prosody to semantics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis.

This handbook plays a fundamental role in sustainable progress in speech research and development. With an accessible format and with accompanying DVD-Rom, it targets three categories of readers: graduate students, professors and active researchers in academia, and engineers in industry who need to understand or implement some specific algorithms for their speech-related products. It is a superb source of application-oriented, authoritative and comprehensive information about these technologies, this work combines the established knowledge derived from research in such fast evolving disciplines as Signal Processing and Communications, Acoustics, Computer Science and Linguistics.

This book offers the first comprehensive description of the prosody of nine Romance languages that takes into account internal dialectal variation. Teams of experts examine the prosody of Catalan, French, Friulian, Italian, Occitan, Portuguese, Romanian, Sardinian, and Spanish using the Autosegmental Metrical framework of intonational phonology and the Tones and Breaks Indices (ToBI) transcription system. The chapters all share a common methodology, based on a common Discourse Completion Task questionnaire, and provide extensive empirical data. The authors then analyse how intonation patterns work together with other grammatical means such as syntactic constructions and discourse particles in the linguistic marking of a varied set of sentence types and pragmatic meanings across Romance languages. The ToBI prosodic systems and annotations proposed for each language are based both on a phonological analysis of the target language as well as on the shared goal of using ToBI analyses that are comparable across Romance languages. This book will pave the way for more systematic typological comparisons of prosody across both Romance and non-Romance languages.

This second edition presents a completely revised overview of research on intonational phonology since the 1970s, including new material on research developments since the mid 1990s. It contains a new section discussing the research on the alignment of pitch features that has developed since the first edition was published, a substantially rewritten section on ToBI transcription that takes account of the application of ToBI principles to other languages, and new sections on the phonetic research on accent and focus. The substantive chapters on the analysis and transcription of pitch contours, pitch range, sentence stress and prosodic structure have been reorganised and updated. In addition, there is an associated website with sound files of the example sentences discussed in the book. This well-known study will continue to appeal to researchers and graduate students who work on any aspect of intonation.