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This chapter presents an overview of the original ToBI system. It reviews the design of the original ToBI system and its foundations in basic and applied research. It describes the inter-disciplinary community of users and uses for which the system was intended, and it outlines how the consensus model of American English intonation and inter-word juncture was achieved by finding points of useful intersection among the research interests and knowledge embodied in this community. It thus identifies the practical principles for designing prosodic annotation conventions that emerged in the course of developing, testing, and using this particular system. The chapter also describes how the original ToBI conventions have been evolved to be the general annotation conventions for several other English varieties and for a number of other languages.

This chapter proposes a model of prosodic typology based on categories of intonation and phrasing, analyzed in the framework of autosegmental-metrical (AM) phonology of intonation. To do this, it examines the ToBI systems and intonational structures of twenty-one languages described in the AM model: thirteen languages in the book and eight languages published elsewhere. The prosodic similarities and differences across these languages are captured by two prosodic categories — prominence and rhythmic/prosodic unit — with each category being further divided into lexical and postlexical levels. It shows that the traditional typology based on the realization of suprasegmental features such as tone, stress, and pitch accent is not ideal for studying prosodic typology. The chapter further discusses the flexibility and extensions of ToBI system.

This chapter describes the prosodic structure of Japanese, and the transcription of intonational patterns using the Japanese ToBI (J-ToBI) system. It discusses the role of pitch accent in Japanese, as well as the levels of phrasing present in the prosodic hierarchy. This structure is compared and contrasted with the intonation systems of other languages that also have been described using the ToBI framework. It provides details of the labels used in a Japanese ToBI transcription, along with a discussion of the motivation for, and issues concerning, many of these labels. It then highlights the differences between J-ToBI and the well-known Beckman–Pierrehumbert model. Finally, it describes efforts toward the automatization of J-ToBI labelling, and summarizes results of labeller agreement studies.

This introductory chapter presents the goal and organization of the book. It describes the intonational framework (autosegmental-metrical phonology of intonation) and the prosodic transcription system (ToBI) adopted by most chapters in the book. It also describes the benefit of transcribing prosodic information, especially a phonological transcription system. Finally, it provides a brief description of each chapter.

This chapter proposes a consensus system for the annotation of Standard German intonation within the framework of autosegmental-metrical phonology: GToBI. First, it provides a survey of existing studies of German intonation, including traditional auditory approaches as well as more recent phonological studies and instrumental analyses. It then gives a detailed exposition of GToBI, showing how the intonation contours considered to be distinctive in the surveyed works can be captured, and compares GToBI to three earlier autosegmental-metrical approaches to German intonation. Finally, it discusses a number of theoretical issues, such as whether pitch accents need to be represented with leading tones or not, how many levels of phrasing are required, and the status and distribution of phrase accents.

This chapter provides an analysis of the prosodic and intonational structure of Greek within the autosegmental/metrical framework of intonational phonology, and presents Greek ToBI (GRToBI), a system for the annotation of Greek spoken corpora based on this analysis. Both the analysis and the annotation system have largely been developed on the basis of a corpus of spoken Greek. The analysis posits five pitch accents (H*, L*, H*+L, L*+H, L+H*), and two levels of phrasing, the intermediate phrase (ip) and the intonational phrase (IP), which are tonally demarcated by three types of phrase accent (H-, L-, !H-) and three types of boundary tone (H%, L%, !H %) respectively. Unlike the original ToBI, GRToBI has five tiers: the Tone Tier, the Words Tier, the Break Index Tier, the Miscellaneous Tier, and the Prosodic Words Tier (a phonetic transcription of prosodic words).

This chapter provides an overview of the Korean prosodic system and introduces the most updated version of K-ToBI (Korean Tones and Break Indices). Korean has two prosodic units marked by intonation: the Accentual Phrase (AP) and the Intonation Phrase (IP). An IP is marked by phrase final lengthening and a final boundary tone. An AP is typically marked by a phrase-final rise contour but the tonal contour can vary depending on the size of an AP and the meaning. Unlike English pitch accent, the tones forming an AP are not distinctive, nor predictable. This motivated a major change in the tone tier of Korean ToBI: a split into a phonological tone tier and a phonetic tone tier. A phonological tone tier labels the prosodic structure and a phonetic tone tier labels the surface tonal pattern of each prosodic unit. Finally, the chapter presents labeller agreement data.

This chapter describes the initial stages of development of a Pan-Mandarin ToBI system. It reviews the salient prosodic characteristics of Mandarin, such as lexical tones, tone sandhi, tonal neutralisation, stress patterns, pitch range effects, and prosodic groupings above the syllable level. Particular attention is paid to the range of variability within a common structural core, in addition to points of reference to other varieties of Chinese and to other languages. It then proposes a codification of conventions for marking prosodic structure and an inventory of tones in two standard varieties (i.e. Putonghua of Mainland China and Guoyu of Taiwan) and one regional variety of the language (i.e. Rugaohua, a Jianghuai Mandarin variety). Also built into the system is the capability to accommodate interactions, such as code-switching events, between different varieties of Mandarin and perhaps between Mandarin and other varieties of Chinese (and other languages) in different social contexts.

This chapter introduces the C-ToBI (Cantonese Tones and Break Indices) conventions for modern Cantonese. These conventions are designed for use in annotating tone and juncture phenomena in spoken Cantonese corpora. Tone and juncture phenomena of special interest for prosodic typology include: the rather strict monosyllabicity of Cantonese word forms; the absence of contrast between ‘stressed’ and reduced (‘neutral tone’) syllables; and the extremely dense syntagmatic tonal specification, including non-segmental boundary tones. All three characteristics set Cantonese apart from Mandarin Chinese. Another phenomenon of interest is that, despite the existence of syllable fusion in Cantonese, there seems to be no reliable categorical markings of intermediate levels of prosodic grouping between the syllable and the intonational phrase. The C-ToBI conventions proposed here are intended to facilitate the development of the large prosodically-annotated speech corpora that are needed to address these issues and the many questions concerning the prosodic structure of modern Cantonese.

This chapter introduces the second volume of Prosodic Typology by pointing out how the second volume differs from the first volume (tonal categories, number of AP languages, number of ToBIs proposed, a methodology chapter) and how 16 other chapters are organized.

The introductory chapter describes the collaborative efforts that led to the collection of articles included in the book, as well as the common features that guided all the chapters devoted to each of the Romance languages studied: a common methodology of data collection, the Discourse Completion Task procedure; a common framework of analysis, the Autosegmental Metrical model of intonational phonology; the collective goal of proposing ToBI analyses for each language and language variety that meet the necessary balance between language-specific phonological systems and cross-language comparison; a shared chapter structure. A summary of each individual chapter is also presented.

The aim of the chapter is to propose a ToBI transcription system for French, F_ToBI. The system is designed in such a way as to (i) be (surface) transparent and easily learnable by researchers working in different theoretical frameworks; and to (ii) make the exchange of data more feasible. It is couched in the Autosegmental Metrical framework and follows the usual ToBI conventions. This is to facilitate research in prosodic typology in particular within Romance, for which ToBI-style systems are often used. F_ToBI is designed to transcribe distinct intonation contours that are generally accepted in the literature on French intonation and which are supported by the analysis of empirical data. While it is inspired by existing theoretical accounts of French phrasing and intonation, it does not follow one single precursor, since its primary goal is to allow for an adequate and comprehensive transcription of French prosody in a cross-dialectal perspective.

This chapter describes the nuclear contours and intonational phrasing patterns of the most common sentence types across varieties of Portuguese. The resulting prosodic analysis is the first contribution to a Portuguese_ToBI proposal that offers a comparative description of four Brazilian Portuguese varieties—Baiano, Mineiro, and the Southeast and South areas of Sulista—and four European Portuguese varieties—Standard European Portuguese, Oporto, Alentejo, and Algarve—with the goal of providing a useful foundation for further systematic studies of Portuguese prosody. The analysis is based on data from the Interactive Atlas of the Prosody of Portuguese. Differences in the intonation of narrow-focus statements, commands, and requests, as well as in the distribution of pitch accents, were found to distinguish Brazilian and European Portuguese. The chapter concludes with an overview of the intonational system of Portuguese and its similarities and differences compared with other Romance languages.

This chapter analyses the main standard and non-standard Romanian melodic contours of two Romanian linguistic areas corresponding to distinct intonational varieties: Moldova and Transylvania. For this purpose, we used a compatible ToBI annotation system (Ro_ToBI) and a speech corpus based on a questionnaire designed to elicit various types of utterances. Each type of intonational contour was analyzed starting from a description based on a sequence of Ro_ToBI pitch events. Special attention was paid to the pitch events that generated the focus in each prosodic phrase. Our descriptions of the Romanian intonational contours agree with those presented by other authors. All labels of the Ro_ToBI set are also found in the annotation systems defined for other languages. The cross-linguistic differences in contour annotation result from different interpretations of the pitch events whose F0 patterns do not match the standard definitions of the labels.

This chapter offers an overview of intonational patterns in Spanish within the Autosegmental Metrical model. In all sections, both cross-dialectal patterns and differences among dialects are pointed out. In broad-focus statements, usually there is a fall throughout the syllable with nuclear accent. A rise and fall within this syllable conveys greater emphasis. In prenuclear accents, the general tendency is to have very late peaks, but this tendency is less prevalent in some varieties. Spanish dialects differ in their unmarked yes-no questions. One contour, found for instance in Madrid and Mexico City, has a low tone on the syllable with nuclear accent, followed by a final rise. The other main contour, typical of Caribbean and Canarian varieties, has a high plateau up to the last stressed syllable, where it falls. In wh-questions, there are less clear dialectal distinctions. Finally, there appears to be no unambiguous imperative intonation, even though imperatives are often segmentally identical to declaratives.

This chapter presents an analysis of the prosodic and intonational structure of Catalan within the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) framework (Pierrehumbert 1980, Pierrehumbert and Beckman 1988, Ladd 1996, Gussenhoven 2004, Jun 2005, and Beckman et al. 2005, among others). The chapter focuses on the description of the main facts about Catalan prosodic phrasing and intonation. It provides a description of the basic intonational tunes found in the language and it exemplifies the basic intonational categories with utterances that provide evidence for the phonological contrasts mentioned.