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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 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.

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.

Italian shows large phonetic and prosodic variations that depend on the geographical and dialectal area the speakers come from. The chapter explicitly focuses on the intonational variation occurring in Italian and offers (1) the key elements of a shared transcription system able to take this into account and (2) an overview of the intonation patterns of thirteen varieties, spoken in cities and towns located in various areas of the Italian peninsula, i.e. Milan, Turin, Florence, Siena, Pisa, Lucca, Rome, Pescara, Naples, Salerno, Cosenza, Bari, and Lecce. The main novelty of the chapter is the clear and explicit effort made in offering analyses and transcriptions that always keep in mind cross-variety comparison to finally facilitate cross-language comparison as well. Importantly, this is the first work on Italian in which this is systematically achieved on the basis of a wide and representative set of sentence types, apart from the number of varieties considered.

This chapter describes the intonation and phrasing patterns that characterize the Logudorese and Campidanese varieties of Sardinian, and examines how intonation interacts with the lexicosyntactic structure to convey specific pragmatic meanings. Using the Discourse Completion Task methodology, data were collected in the Sardinian locales of Ìttiri, Òschiri, Lodè, Biddecrèsia, and Sìnnia. The analysis revealed the existence of a mid tone (!H-) to mark non-finality or continuation, the absence of rising patterns in yes-no questions, and the abundance of initial prominences. On the basis of the results presented in the chapter, it is claimed that although intonation seems not to be a strong cue to distinguish between the two macro-varieties of Sardinian, dialectal differences are found in the use of lexicosyntactic markers that introduce yes-no questions and in the application of truncation in vocatives.

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.