Prosodia. Modelli e ricerca empirica

The manual (explicity intended for university students of General Linguistics) offers an overview of the theoretical and empirical aspects of prosody, with particular regard to intonation. At present, the prosodic aspects of languages occupy a relevant place in speech research. The intonation has recently attracted considerable interest in different experimental frameworks (i.e. linguistics, phonetics and phonology, pragmatics, psycholinguistics etc.). This manual aims to provide a description of more recurrent prosodic phenomena. The acoustic and perception properties of intonation as well as its various functions are explicitly treated in relation to more representative theoretical approaches. A specific space is also devoted to the illustration of the main melodic contours of the regional varieties of Italian, as well as those of major European languages. The book includes a multimedial CD-ROM that illustrates most of the phenomena described, allowing the audio recordings of Italian and foreign languages.