Despite the recent advances in the integration of lexical tone and intonation in phonological theory, all too often the study of intonation and the study of lexical tone are viewed as belonging to different research traditions. This collection aims to strengthen the integrated approach by studying tone and intonation within a common framework, and by tracing their interaction in specific prosodic systems. Some papers deal with the structural properties of lexical tone and intonation, e.g. of Zina Kotoko (Cameroon), Borgloon Dutch (Belgium), and European Portuguese, while others focus on the historical development of the prosodic systems of Basque, Kagoshima Japanese and Scandinavian. The volume also includes a re-evaluation of a classic paper on the typology of tone rules, and a survey of features signalling question intonation in African languages.

This volume presents 14 experimental studies of lexical tone and intonation in a wide variety of languages. Six papers deal with the discriminability or the function of intonation contours and lexical tones in specific languages, as established on the basis of listener responses, as well as with brain activation patterns resulting from the perception of tonal and intonational stimuli. The remaining eight papers report on detailed phonetic findings on a variety of tonal phenomena in a number of languages, including declination in tone languages, final lowering, consonant-tone interactions and pitch target alignment.

Despite the recent advances in the integration of lexical tone and intonation in phonological theory, all too often the study of intonation and the study of lexical tone are viewed as belonging to different research traditions. This collection strengthens the integrated approach by studying tone and intonation within a common framework, and by tracing their interaction in specific prosodic systems. Some papers deal with the structural properties of lexical tone and intonation, while others focus on the historical development of prosodic systems. The volume also includes a re-evaluation of a classic paper on the typology of tone rules, and a survey of features signalling question intonation in African languages.

This text illustrates an approach to prosodic typology through descriptions of the intonation and the prosodic structure of 13 typologically different languages based on the same theoretical framework and the transcription system of prosody known as Tones and Break Indices (ToBI).

Prosody is one of the core components of language and speech, indicating information about syntax, turn-taking in conversation, types of utterances, such as questions or statements, as well as speakers' attitudes and feelings. This edited volume takes studies in prosody on Asian languages as well as examples from other languages. It brings together the most recent research in the field and also charts the influence on such diverse fields as multimedia communication and SLA. Intended for a wide audience of linguists that includes neighbouring disciplines such as computational sciences, psycholinguists, and specialists in language acquisition, Prosodic Studies is also ideal for scholars and researchers working in intonation who want a complement of information on specifics.

This is the first comprehensive work on word and sentence prosody in Koshikijima Japanese, a dialect of Japanese not fully documented in the literature. It is an endangered dialect spoken by about 2,000 speakers on a small southern island in Japan. Being separated from mainland dialects by the sea, this dialect exhibits unique prosodic features not shared by other Japanese dialects. It also exhibits considerable regional variations among the ten or more small villages that were isolated from each other until recently. Based on the author’s fieldwork, the book analyzes word accent and intonation, the two linguistic areas in which this endangered dialect exhibits unique features and remarkable regional variations within itself. They include the emergence and development of a secondary H tone, postlexical deletion of the primary H tone, and the L boundary tone in question and vocative intonation. These phenomena bear crucially on general issues in prosody, including postlexical tonal neutralizations, competitions between lexical and postlexical tones, and the number of tones that a syllable can maximally bear. The book thus demonstrates the relevance of studying an endangered language/dialect in general linguistic contexts.