Intonation and Prosodic Structure

Description

This book provides a state-of-the-art survey of intonation and prosodic structure. Taking a phonological perspective, it shows how morpho-syntactic constituents are mapped to prosodic constituents according to well-formedness conditions. Using a tone-sequence model of intonation, it explores individual tones and how they combine, and discusses how information structure affects intonation in several ways, showing tones and melodies to be 'meaningful' in that they add a pragmatic component to what is being said. The author also shows how, despite a superficial similarity, languages differ in how their tonal patterns arise from tone concatenation. Lexical tones, stress, phrase tones, and boundary tones are assigned differently in different languages, resulting in great variation in intonational grammar, both at the lexical and sentential level. The last chapter is dedicated to experimental studies of how we process prosody. The book will be of interest to advanced students and researchers in linguistics, and particularly in phonological theory.

Caroline Fery was educated in Brussels, her native town, and in Konstanz. From 1999, she was Professor for Theory of Grammar/Phonology at the University of Potsdam where she founded the Research Center on Information Structure funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Since 2009, she has been Professor of Phonology at the Goethe University Frankfurt, where she is the director of a graduate school on nominal modification. Her interests lie in the prosodic and tonal structure of languages, and in the interface between syntax and intonation, as well as in the theory of grammar. She has edited several books.

'This book will make a very useful resource for graduate students and researchers in other areas of linguistics wanting to understand how prosody and intonation work on a theoretical and practical level. It is becoming increasingly clear that prosody and intonation interact with all other levels of language, from phones to whole discourses, so researchers need the tools and understanding to analyse the contribution of prosody to their data. It is great to see the broad coverage of levels of prosody and languages in this book.' Sasha Calhoun, Senior Lecturer and Linguistics Programme Director, Victoria University of Wellington