Recent findings on phonetic detail have been taken as supporting exemplar-based approaches to prosody. Through four experiments on both production and perception of both melodic and temporal detail in Neapolitan Italian, we show that prosodic detail is not incompatible with abstractionist approaches either. Specifically, we suggest that the exploration of prosodic detail leads to a refined understanding of the relationships between the richly specified and continuous varying phonetic information on one side, and coarse phonologically structured contrasts on the other, thus offering insights on how pragmatic information is conveyed by prosody.

Recent findings on phonetic detail have been taken as supporting exemplar-based approaches to prosody. Through four experiments on both produc tion and perception of both melodic and temporal detail in Neapolitan Italian, we show that prosodic detail is not incompatible with abstractionist approaches either. Specifically, we suggest that the exploration of prosodic detail leads to a refined understanding of the relationships between the richly specified and continuously varying phonetic information on one side, and coarse phonologically structured contrasts on the other, thus of fering insights on how pragmatic information is conveyed by prosody. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

This book presents a collection of pioneering papers reflecting current methods in prosody research with a focus on Romance languages. The rapid expansion of the field of prosody research in the last decades has given rise to a proliferation of methods that has left little room for the critical assessment of these methods. The aim of this volume is to bridge this gap by embracing original contributions, in which experts in the field assess, reflect, and discuss different methods of data gathering and analysis. The book might thus be of interest to scholars and established researchers as well as to students and young academics who wish to explore the topic of prosody, an expanding and promising area of study.

The volume represents a state-of-the-art snapshot of the research on prosody for phoneticians, linguists and speech technologists. It covers well-known models and languages. How are prosodies linked to speech sounds? What are the relations between prosody and grammar? What does speech perception tell us about prosody, particularly about the constituting elements of intonation and rhythm? The papers of the volume address questions like these with a special focus on how the notion of context-based coding, the knowledge of prosodic functions and the communicative embedding of prosodic elements can advance our understanding of prosody.

Prosody has been characterised as a "half-tamed savage" being shaped by both discrete, categorical aspects as well as gradient, continuous phenomena. This book is concerned with the relation of the "wild" and the "tamed" sides of prosodic prominence. It reviews problems that arise from a strict separation of categorical and continuous representations in models of phonetics and phonology, and it explores the potential role of descriptions aimed at reconciling the two domains. In doing so, the book offers an introduction to dynamical systems, a framework that has been studied extensively in the last decades to model speech production and perception. The reported acoustic and articulatory data presented in this book show that categorical and continuous modulations used to enhance prosodic prominence are deeply intertwined and even exhibit a kind of symbiosis. A multi-dimensional dynamical model of prosodic prominence is sketched, based on the empirical data, combining tonal and articulatory aspects of prosodic focus marking. The model demonstrates how categorical and continuous aspects can be integrated in a joint theoretical treatment that overcomes a strict separation of phonetics and phonology.

This work is an investigation of the relation between prosodic structure, intonational structure and (some instances of) focus realisation in European Portuguese (EP). The prosodic account has been developed within the relation-based framework of prosodic hierarchy theory and the autosegmental-metrical theory of intonational phonology. The approach is both theoretical and laboratory phonology research. Based on the analysis of various types of evidence (i.e. Gandhi processes, rhythmic, intentional and boundary strength phenomena), issues such as prosodic layering and the effect of branchingness and phrase length on prosodic phrasing are discussed. Specifically, I-recursion in the form of restricted Compound Prosodic Domains is argued for. Moreover, the fact that the diverse manifestations of prosodic structure point to the same hierarchical organization of the flow of speech into Fs and Is crucially assigns to the prosodic hierarchy a pivotal place in phrasal phonlogy. Attention is paid, furthermore, to aspects of intonational structure like tonal association and alignment, the characterization of leading and trailing tones, and pitch accents structure. It is argued that the HL accents of EP are 'real' bitonal events whose features favour a hierarchical-structured analysis of pitch accent structure. With regard to focus, it is shown that in EP focus is phonologically expressed by means of stress and accents effects and crucially not by means of phrasing effects. And crucially not by means of phrasing effects. Of particular importance is the selection of a special pitch accent to convey (early or late) focus, and the implications it has or the standard positional account of prominence and the stress reversal analysis of prominence patterns. Throughout the work, the EP findings, as well as the proposals set forth, are discussed from a cross-linguistic perspective, with special reference to languages like English, Dutch, German, different varieties of Italian, and Bengali. Also relevant to a general understanding of the prosodic reflexes of focus are languages like Hungarian, Korean, Basque and Wolof.

The contributions to this volume focus on the interrelation between prosody and iconicity and shed new light on the topic by enlarging the number of parameters traditionally considered, and by confronting various theoretical backgrounds. The parameters taken into account include socio-linguistic criteria (age, sex, socio-economic category, region); different kinds of speech situation; affect (attitudes and emotions); gestures; morpho-syntactic constraints. The analysis is pursued in theoretical frameworks such as Information Structure theory, Grice's theory, Relevance theory, experiential blending, Gussenhoven's biological codes, prosodic modelling, automatic detection. The languages covered include English, French, Italian, Swedish, Egyptian Arabic, and Majorcan Catalan. The book will be of great interest to linguists working on prosody.

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.

This handbook provides a detailed account of the phenomenon of vowel harmony, a pattern according to which all vowels within a word must agree for some phonological property or properties. Vowel harmony has been central in the development of phonological theories thanks to its cluster of remarkable properties, notably its typically 'unbounded' character and its non-locality, and because it forms part of the phonology of most world languages. The five parts of this volume cover all aspects of vowel harmony from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. Part I outlines the types of vowel harmony and some unusual cases, before Part II explores structural issues such as vowel inventories, the interaction of vowel harmony and morphological structure, and locality. The chapters in Part III provide an overview of the various theoretical accounts of the phenomenon, as well as bringing in insights from language acquisition and psycholinguistics, while Part IV focuses on the historical life cycle of vowel harmony, looking at topics such as phonetic factors and the effect of language contact. The final part contains 31 chapters that present data and analysis of vowel harmony across all major language families as well as several isolates, constituting the broadest coverage of the phenomenon to date.