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This paper proposes on the basis of experimental material that pitch scaling in an intonation language such as German is relational rather than absolute. In other words, the height of a pitch accent depends on the presence of other pitch accents in the same prosodic domain. A further point made in the paper ist hat the raising of lowering of pitch accents because of information structure does not necessarily affect prosodic phrasing, which is primarily mapped to syntax.

Chapter 8 ‘Towards a Typology of Focus Realization’ by Daniel Büring presents a first attempt to formulate a cross‐linguistic theory of focus realization, that is, of how different languages express focusing. By far not all languages mark focused constituents via pitch accent placement, the way Germanic languages do.  Rather, focusing is variously reflected in prosodic phrasing, constituent ordering, via special focus morphemes, and perhaps in some cases, not at all.  The chapter explores the hypothesis that there is still something systematic to be said about focus realization, that is, that there is a common analytical apparatus that can capture the cross‐linguistic variation, based on the  Prominence Theory of Focus Realization.

Bever (1970) proposed an explanation of the extreme processing difficulty of doubly center-embedded relative clause constructions based on a general cognitive “double-function” constraint. This chapter resurrects and revises an alternative explanation proposed by Frazier and Fodor (1978), based on a phrasal “packaging” subcomponent of the parsing mechanism. They observed that the linear sequence of phrasal packages constructed online by this device runs counter to the deeply hierarchical syntactic structure. Fodor argues here that recasting the online packaging process as the division of the word string into prosodic phrases improves on the original account because prosodic phrases (at least in English) are flexible in size; they can contain a variable number of words due to various phonological compression techniques such as de-stressing. Syntax-compatible prosodic structure can be established as long as the phrase lengths and stress pattern are conducive to it; parsing and comprehension can then proceed more easily.

This chapter compares three possible analyses of DP-internal concord asymmetries, the first two having originally been designed to handle subject-verb asymmetries. The one-step analysis by Samek-Lodovici would especially run into problems with the fact that, in certain dialects of Spanish, the asymmetry is triggered by specific nouns and only in the singular. In the second proposal, a two-step process, there is full concord syntactically and, at PF, weakening rules restricted to prosodic phrases determine the final asymmetric concord. This proposal raises several questions concerning the construction of initial prosodic phrasing and encounters problems especially with the analysis of Asturian, where there is gender concord prenominally but mass concord postnominally.

This chapter provides an analysis of the prosodic and intonational structure of European Portuguese. It describes and argues for the PW, the PhP, and the IP as domains of EP prosodic hierarchy, shows that focus has no effects on prosodic phrasing, and accounts for the major intonational features of the language.

This chapter examines the main similarities and differences in the prosodic and intonation systems of the nine Romance languages and their varieties described in the previous chapters. The first section is devoted to patterns of prominence and phrasing, providing a survey of word and phrase-level prominence features and prosodic domains that are intonationally relevant for each language. The second section discusses the nuclear contours of main utterance types, as well as the use of lexical and syntactic markers to convey pragmatic meanings, and their interaction with intonation. The third section offers a systematic comparison of the nine intonation systems, focusing on the types, complexity, and distribution of pitch events, and the types of nuclear configurations obtained. The final section offers an overview of the common prosodic features and of the main dimensions of variation found across Romance languages, together with a reflection on their contribution to prosodic typology.

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.

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.

Studies of prosodic structure in French have tended to concentrate on production in order to identify what levels of phrasing speakers differentiate. But what are listeners hearing? The chapter details the examination of some specific structures (dislocations and focused phrases) to see whether listeners’ perceptions align with the prosodic structures that have been proposed. The approach used is Rapid Prosody Transcription, in which untrained listeners are asked to identify words they perceive as prominent or places where they perceive a break in the flow of speech (phrasal boundary). Descriptions of French agree that prominences occur either initially or finally in the smallest-sized phrase. While the majority of locations where listeners marked boundaries were perceived as preceded by a prominent word, because more prominences than boundaries were marked these did not necessarily co-occur with boundaries. Dislocated words were perceived as both prominent and separated from the main clause by a boundary.