Intonational Phrasing in Romance and Germanic

Languages differ regarding both the ways they group words into phrases and the surface cues they use to indicate relevant phrasing patterns. Modeling intonation in as many languages as possible has become a central goal of theoretical and empirical linguistics. However, intonational research has only recently begun to devote attention to the analysis of spontaneous speech, one of the central issues of this book. The volume contains eight contributions by international scholars, some of them members of the Research Center on “Multilingualism” (Hamburg, Germany), all of them experts on intonation and most also on multilingualism. A central goal of the present volume is to expand the cross-linguistic and multilingual perspective of phrasing, focusing thereby on languages from the Romance and Germanic families, among them Catalan, French, German, Italian, Occitan, and Spanish. Within Spanish, special attention is given to several Argentinean varieties, and within Italian, the Neapolitan variety is compared with the standard one.

Sónia Frota, University of Lisbon:
This book addresses intonational phrasing from a multilingual perspective. It is especially relevant, and novel, the discussion of phrasing in language contact and cross-dialectal situations, and bilingualism, dealing both with the ways in which phrasing is realized and their implications for prosodic theory. It makes an important contribution to our understanding of the organization of speech chunks at the crossroads of multilingual modern society.