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.

Intonation is a subject of increasing importance in fields from syntax to speech recognition. D. Robert Ladd provides an exceptionally clear presentation of the key ideas of the influential autosegmental-metrical theory of intonational phonology associated with the work of Janet Pierrehumbert. He outlines the evidence for the theory's basic tenets and relates them to the ideas of competing approaches in a way that will allow sceptics to reach an informed opinion and he presents a wealth of new material on the cross-language comparison of intonation couched in autosegmental-metrical terms. He also draws attention to problems in Pierrehumbert's version of the autosegmental-metrical theory, and offers some theoretical proposals of his own. This book will appeal to phonologists and phoneticians as an original contribution to the debates it discusses, and will be welcomed by a wide range of students and researchers as an ideal overview of recent work.

This book illustrates an approach to prosodic typology through descriptions of the intonation and the prosodic structure of thirteen typologically different languages based on the same theoretical framework, the 'autosegmental-metrical' model of intonational phonology, and the transcriptionsystem of prosody known as Tones and Break Indices (ToBI). It is the first book introducing the history and principles of this system and it covers European languages, Asian languages, an Australian aboriginal language, and an American Indian language. The book shows how languages and dialects aresimilar to or different from other languages or dialect varieties in terms of the prosodic structure, the intonational categories, and their realizations. This is the first book on intonation which is accompanied by a CD-ROM where sound files mentioned in each chapter are stored.

Publisher Description

First published in 1996. This book examines the phonetics and phonology of Korean prosody. Based on phonetic experiments, it proposes intonationally marked prosodic constituents above the word which condition various connected speech phenomena. This title will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.

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.

This book provides a state-of-the-art survey of intonation and prosody from a phonological perspective, for advanced students and researchers in phonology.