Romance intonation. Introduction

Intonation in Romance: Systemic similarities and differences

An Introduction to Intonation – Functions and Models

This chapter provides an introduction to intonation in general, and is loosely based on an oral presentation given in the workshop “Non-native prosody: phonetic description and teaching practice” in Saarbrücken. Although intonation is particularly difficult for learners of a second language to master, it is seldom taught systematically. Although much of the early work on intonation was didactic...

The encoding of epistemic operations in two Romance languages: intonation and pragmatic markers

For years linguists have noted that intonation patterns and sentence-final discourse particles encode similar meanings across languages (e.g., [23], [21]). Yet the division of labor between the two kinds of systems—and in particular whether there exists a compensatory distribution between them— remains to be clarified. In this article, we focus on two languages within the Romance group (Catalan...

Intonation segments and segmental intonation

An acoustic analysis of a German dialogue corpus showed that the sound qualities and durations of fricatives, vocoids, and diphthongs at the ends of question and statement utterances varied systematically with the utterance-final intonation segments, which were high-rising in the questions and terminal-falling in the statements. The ways in which the variations relate to phenomena like sibilant...

Romance is so complex

In this paper I want to look at what the evidence from Complex Predicates can tell us about the design parameters of an empirically adequate theory of Universal Grammar (UG). This is a fertile field for investigation because, according to the standard assumptions of the field, complex predicates are monoclausal with respect to some properties and multiclausal with respect to others and this ten...