Despite the recent advances in the integration of lexical tone and intonation in phonological theory, all too often the study of intonation and the study of lexical tone are viewed as belonging to different research traditions. This collection strengthens the integrated approach by studying tone and intonation within a common framework, and by tracing their interaction in specific prosodic systems. Some papers deal with the structural properties of lexical tone and intonation, while others focus on the historical development of prosodic systems. The volume also includes a re-evaluation of a classic paper on the typology of tone rules, and a survey of features signalling question intonation in African languages.

This volume presents 14 experimental studies of lexical tone and intonation in a wide variety of languages. Six papers deal with the discriminability or the function of intonation contours and lexical tones in specific languages, as established on the basis of listener responses, as well as with brain activation patterns resulting from the perception of tonal and intonational stimuli. The remaining eight papers report on detailed phonetic findings on a variety of tonal phenomena in a number of languages, including declination in tone languages, final lowering, consonant-tone interactions and pitch target alignment.

Despite the recent advances in the integration of lexical tone and intonation in phonological theory, all too often the study of intonation and the study of lexical tone are viewed as belonging to different research traditions. This collection aims to strengthen the integrated approach by studying tone and intonation within a common framework, and by tracing their interaction in specific prosodic systems. Some papers deal with the structural properties of lexical tone and intonation, e.g. of Zina Kotoko (Cameroon), Borgloon Dutch (Belgium), and European Portuguese, while others focus on the historical development of the prosodic systems of Basque, Kagoshima Japanese and Scandinavian. The volume also includes a re-evaluation of a classic paper on the typology of tone rules, and a survey of features signalling question intonation in African languages.

This handbook presents detailed accounts of current research in all aspects of language prosody, written by leading experts from different disciplines. The volume's comprehensive coverage and multidisciplinary approach will make it an invaluable resource for all researchers, students, and practitioners interested in prosody.

This is the first comprehensive work on word and sentence prosody in Koshikijima Japanese, a dialect of Japanese not fully documented in the literature. It is an endangered dialect spoken by about 2,000 speakers on a small southern island in Japan. Being separated from mainland dialects by the sea, this dialect exhibits unique prosodic features not shared by other Japanese dialects. It also exhibits considerable regional variations among the ten or more small villages that were isolated from each other until recently. Based on the author’s fieldwork, the book analyzes word accent and intonation, the two linguistic areas in which this endangered dialect exhibits unique features and remarkable regional variations within itself. They include the emergence and development of a secondary H tone, postlexical deletion of the primary H tone, and the L boundary tone in question and vocative intonation. These phenomena bear crucially on general issues in prosody, including postlexical tonal neutralizations, competitions between lexical and postlexical tones, and the number of tones that a syllable can maximally bear. The book thus demonstrates the relevance of studying an endangered language/dialect in general linguistic contexts.

This volume is a collection of cutting-edge research papers written by well-known researchers in the field of Romance phonetics and phonology. An important goal of this book is to bridge the gap between traditional Romance linguistics — with its long and rich tradition in data collection, cross-language comparison, and phonetic variation — and laboratory phonology work. The book is organized around three main themes: segmental processes, prosody, and the acquisition of segments and prosody. The various articles provide new empirical data on production, perception, sound change, first and second language learning, rhythm and intonation, presenting a state-of-the-art overview of research in laboratory phonology centred on Romance languages. The Romance data are used to test the predictions of a number of theoretical frameworks such as gestural phonology, exemplar models, generative phonology and optimality theory. The book will constitute a useful companion volume for phoneticians, phonologists and researchers investigating sound structure in Romance languages, and will serve to generate further interest in laboratory phonology.

This text illustrates an approach to prosodic typology through descriptions of the intonation and the prosodic structure of 13 typologically different languages based on the same theoretical framework and the transcription system of prosody known as Tones and Break Indices (ToBI).