Intonational cues to discourse structure in a regional variety of Italian

In this chapter, an account of intonational strategies used by Bari Italian speakers in signal non-finality and pre-finality in discourse organisation is presented and discussed. Results obtained from auditory and instrumental analysis of speech material elicited with different methods (Map Task dialogues and monologues, lists readings) show that a rich inventory of intonational choices is available to Bari Italian speakers for conveying subordination relationships within a sequence of information (in a route describing task, this is normally a sequence of instructions and/or explanations), but also for signalling in advance the end of the sequence (pre-finality). However, the use of pre-final contours is found to be not systematically used in read lists. This seems to indicate that in studying pre-final intonational strategies, simple list reading is not a fully reliable methodology for eliciting speech materials for intonation analysis. Moreover, these results represent a further contribution to the development of an autosegmental-metrical account of the Bari Italian intonation system.