This volume provides new insights into various issues on prosody in contact situations, contact referring here to the L2 acquisition process as well as to situations where two language systems may co-exist. A wide array of phenomena are dealt with (prosodic description of linguistic systems in contact situations, analysis of prosodic changes, language development processes, etc.), and the results obtained may give an indication of what is more or less stable in phonological and prosodic systems. In addition, the selected papers clearly show how languages may have influenced or may have been influenced by other language varieties (in multilingual situations where different languages are in constant contact with one another, but also in the process of L2 acquisition). Unlike previous volumes on related topics, which focus in general either on L2 acquisition or on the description and analyses of different varieties of a given language, this volume considers both topics in parallel, allowing comparison and discussion of the results, which may shed new light on more far-reaching theoretical questions such as the role of markedness in prosody and the causes of prosodic changes.

Based on the Workshop on Prosody and Meaning in Barcelona on September 17-18, 2009, this volume brings together researchers working on issues of the prosodic encoding and expression of sentence-level meaning. The contributions to the book result from a vivid exchange of research ideas and research methodologies on issues related to the relationship between prosody and meaning and from stimulating discussions and collaborative work between researchers coming from different perspectives.

A comprehensive, detailed, and well-illustrated undergraduate French language/linguistics textbook with CD-ROM. The book focuses on pronunciation of Modern Standard French, and incorporates regional and social variations, abbreviatory processes and 'word play'. It looks at historical phonological changes which continue through today. Perfect for readers and learners with little or no formal training in linguistics. The CD-ROM provides invaluable oral examples crucial to linguistic study.

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.

This monograph describes the development of Rhapsodie, a 33,000-word syntactic and prosodic treebank of spoken French created with the aim of modeling the interface between prosody, syntax and discourse in spoken French. Theoretical foundations and methodological choices are presented and discussed, and compared with other contemporary approaches. Why is a data-driven instead of a corpus-based approach necessary when one wants to model and analyze discourse without neglecting the features typical of everyday speech, in order to capture not only what we say but also how we say it? How can one show that verbal exchange operates as a collaborative enterprise and how can the specific syntactic and prosodic markers of this collaboration be merged? The description proposed in this collective book is of interest for specialists of spoken French studies, and also for scholars who would like to extend Rhapsodie-like annotation schemes to other languages.

This volume presents a selection of French varieties representing the great diversity of this language along geographical, social, and stylistic dimensions. Twelve illustrations from regions as far removed as Western Canada and Central Africa represent widely divergent social contexts of language use. Each chapter is based on original surveys conducted within the framework of the Phonology of Contemporary French project, described in the Introduction. These surveys constitute an invaluable source of new data for researchers, as many of the varieties included are otherwise undocumented in any systematic way. The chapters follow a similar format: presentation of the survey(s) and the sociolinguistic dimensions of the variety studied; description of the phonological inventory of the system(s), principal allophonic realizations, phonotactic constraints, behavior of schwa, behavior of liaison consonants, and other notable characteristics. The book opens with an informative introduction and closes with a chapter providing a synthesis of the major findings by continent.