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9 Intonation

  • Philippe Martin
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Abstract

When described in the Dependency Incremental (DI) instead of the Autosegmental- Metrical (AM) framework, the phonological descriptions of sentence intonation in various Romance languages appear very similar, with the exception of French. In the DI framework, non-emphatic melodic movements located on stressed vowels indicate dependency relations between prosodic words, leading incrementally to sentence- level prosodic structure. The singularity of French, in terms of phrasing, i.e. of segmentation into accentual phrases, is due to the lack of lexical stress present in the other Romance languages.

Abstract

When described in the Dependency Incremental (DI) instead of the Autosegmental- Metrical (AM) framework, the phonological descriptions of sentence intonation in various Romance languages appear very similar, with the exception of French. In the DI framework, non-emphatic melodic movements located on stressed vowels indicate dependency relations between prosodic words, leading incrementally to sentence- level prosodic structure. The singularity of French, in terms of phrasing, i.e. of segmentation into accentual phrases, is due to the lack of lexical stress present in the other Romance languages.

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