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.

An innovative and unified grammar of sentence intonation, applied to six Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan and Romanian).

"One of the most remarkable features of phonation is the disruption of the normal respiratory cycle. Indeed, outside phonation, the normal cycle of respiration presents a comparable duration for both the inspiration and the expiration (top of Figure 1.1). Figure 1.1 Respiration cycle, without phonation (top) and with phonation (bottom) The first produced prosodic units are breath groups. At early stages of language learning, children mainly use the necessary silent pause in the inspiration phase of their respiratory cycle as boundary markers of these units. The phonation process results from the air flow generated by the lung compression during the respiration-expiration phase. This air flow generates the necessary subglottal pressure needed to produce the vibration of the vocal folds for voiced sounds (vowels, voiced consonants), friction for fricative consonants, and intraoral pressure to allow the production of stop consonants"--

Marking the climax of over fourty years of investigation and reflection by Professor Bolinger, this major study looks at how intonation varies among speakers and societies in terms of age, sex, and region; how it interacts with grammar; and how it has been invoked to explain certain questions of logic. The discussion of variation shows the degree to which intonation can be conventionalised yet embody a universal core of feelings and attitudes, renewed with each generation.

Intonational Grammar in Ibero-Romance: Approaches across linguistic subfields is a volume of empirical research papers incorporating recent theoretical, methodological, and interdisciplinary advances in the field of intonation, as they relate to the Ibero-Romance languages. The volume brings together leading experts in Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish, as well as in the intonation of Spanish in contact situations. The common thread is that each paper examines a specific topic related to the intonation of at least one Ibero-Romance language, framing the analysis in an experimental setting. The novel findings of each chapter hinge on critical connections that are made between the study of intonation and its related fields of linguistic inquiry, including syntax, pragmatics, sociophonetics, language acquisition and special populations. In this sense, the volume expands the traditional scope of Ibero-Romance intonation, including in it work on signed languages (LSC), individuals with autism spectrum disorder and individuals with Williams Syndrome. This volume establishes the precedent for researchers and advanced students who wish to explore the complexities of Ibero-Romance intonation. It also serves as a showcase of the most up-to-date methodologies in intonational research.

The revised edition of David Brazil's seminal work The Communicative Value of Intonation in English.