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."

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.

Different components of grammar interact in non-trivial ways. It has been under debate what the actual range of interaction is and how we can most appropriately represent this in grammatical theory. The volume provides a general overview of various topics in the linguistics of Romance languages by examining them through the interaction of grammatical components and functions as a state-of-the-art report, but at the same time as a manual of Romance languages.

This is a collection of edited papers which were presented at the international conference 'Procedural Meaning'. It is suitable for those who are interested in or already working on procedural meaning from different points of view and to identify various challenges that can determine the directions for research.

The intense language contact between Spanish and Catalan in Catalonia has led to cross-linguistic influence at all linguistic levels, but its effect on the prosody of these languages has received little attention to date. Based on semi-spontaneous and read speech data from 31 Catalan–Spanish bilinguals, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of the intonation of Spanish and Catalan as spoken in Girona, with a focus on the speakers’ bilingualism. These contact varieties share numerous intonational properties, with differences mainly in the frequency of specific tunes in certain contexts. However, they also exhibit significant variation, often linked to extralinguistic factors such as the bilinguals’ language dominance. Overall, the intonation of these contact varieties results from substratum transfer and wholesale convergence between the prosodic systems of Spanish and Catalan. The book is particularly relevant to scholars researching prosody, language contact, variation, and multilingualism.

This volume offers a range of synchronic and diachronic case studies in comparative Germanic and Romance morphosyntax. These two language families, spoken by over a billion people today, have played a central role in linguistic research, but many significant questions remain about the relationship between them. Following an introduction that sets out the methodological, empirical, and theoretical background to the book, the volume is divided into three parts that deal with the morphosyntax of subjects and the inflectional layer; inversion, discourse pragmatics, and the left periphery; and continuity and variation beyond the clause. The contributors adopt a diverse range of approaches, making use of the latest digitized corpora and presenting a mixture of well-known and under-studied data from standard and non-standard Germanic and Romance languages. Many of the chapters challenge received wisdom about the relationship between these two important language families. The volume will be an indispensable resource for researchers and students in the fields of Germanic and Romance linguistics, historical and comparative linguistics, and morphosyntax.