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Intonation and Prosodic Structure

Intonation and Prosodic Structure

Intonation and Prosodic Structure

Caroline Féry, Institute of Linguistics
December 2016
Available
Hardback
9781107008069

    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.

    • Provides a broad overview of mainstream generative approaches in intonation and prosodic structure
    • Covers a large number of languages and facilitates a comparison of their tonal and prosodic systems
    • Provides in-depth analyses of the interfaces between intonation and prosodic structure, and also of syntax and semantics

    Reviews & endorsements

    '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

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    Product details

    December 2016
    Hardback
    9781107008069
    388 pages
    225 × 147 × 27 mm
    0.62kg
    120 b/w illus. 12 tables
    Available

    Table of Contents

    • 1. Introduction
    • 2. Phonetic correlates of intonation
    • 3. Lower-level prosodic constituents
    • 4. Intonation and syntax: the higher-level prosodic constituents
    • 5. Models of intonation
    • 6. Intonation and meaning
    • 7. Tone and stress at the word level
    • 8. Sentence intonation in a typological comparison
    • 9. The processing of intonation
    • 10. Summary and conclusion.
      Author
    • Caroline Féry , Institute of Linguistics

      Caroline Féry 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.