Intonation Systems: A Survey of Twenty Languages

by Daniel Hirst (Editor), Albert Di Cristo (Editor)

This is the first comprehensive study of the intonation of different languages of the world, written by a team of leading scholars in the field, most of whom are native speakers of the language in question. Surveying twenty languages, the volume introduces a new system for the multilingual transcription of intonation patterns. The chapters are organized following the same general outline to highlight the differences among languages. The emphasis is on description and comparison, rather than on theory, making this an invaluable sourcebook for researchers in the field.

Genres: Linguistics

500 pages, Paperback

First published December 10, 1998

Reviews

[Viet Nguyen]

Great introduction to the intonation systems of many languages, though it seems to focus more on Indo-european languages. Luckily I found the part for Vietnamese, which I am researching for my thesis.

[Stephanie]

Although the text provided an interesting overview of instrumental work on intonation and prosody, my biggest complaint was that 75% of the chapters looked at Indo-European languages, and of those, roughly 80% were on Germanic or Romance languages. To my fellow linguists: it's well past time to branch out.