Intonation and Prosodic Structure

Key Topics in Phonology

by Caroline Féry

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.

Genres: Linguistics

388 pages, Paperback

Published September 20, 2018

Reviews

[Karen Chung · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are interested in phonetics and intonation, this book is really worth working through. I teach phonetics, and breezed through the first several chapters, since it is material I largely knew already. At some point the book became more interesting, since it began introducing systems, data and analyses from languages other than English and from different schools of thought and approaches. I even read through the glossary at the end carefully and saved many of the definitions for future reference, most often because they gave a handy name to something I routinely cover in my classes. Féry's hard and careful work have paid off in the form of a solid, practical and readable work.