Intonation in Romance

Abstract

Abstract This book offers a comprehensive description of the prosody of nine Romance languages (Catalan, French, Friulian, Italian, Occitan, Portuguese, Romanian, Sardinian, and Spanish) which takes into account internal dialectal variation. The prosodic analysis of all nine languages has been couched in a common framework, the Autosegmental Metrical framework of intonational phonology and the ToBI transcription system, and has been carried out by groups of well-known experts on the prosody of these languages. One of the two noteworthy aspects of the book is the common methodology used in each of the chapters, which was based on a common Discourse Completion Task questionnaire. The elicited DCT data allow for an analysis of how intonation patterns work together with other grammatical means (syntactic constructions, discourse particles) in the linguistic marking of a varied set of sentence-types and pragmatic meanings across Romance languages. The second important aspect of the book is the fact that the ToBI prosodic systems and annotations proposed for each language are based both on a phonological analysis of the target language and on the shared goal of using ToBI analyses that are comparable across Romance languages.