A prosodic account of Italian exclamative sentences: a gating approach

This study investigates the intonation of Bari exclamative sentences. In this Southern variety of Italian, the prosodic features of non-wh exclamatives and broad focus statements have been studied in both production and perception. By means of a gating experiment, stimuli of partial or complete utterances were presented to listeners in order to verify the melodic differences between sentence minimal pairs, i.e. exclamative vs. assertive. Results obtained with listeners suggest that the initial f0 pattern has a very strong effect on the perception of exclamatives. Therefore sentences were successfully identified by listeners before hearing the complete version. The gating test suggested that Bari listeners were able to distinguish broad focus statements and non-wh exclamatives even when the nuclear contour was absent. As a rule, exclamations appeared to be better recognized in an hearing task. The perception results have to be linked to their phonetic consistence. The exclamative sentences exhibit a relevant prosodic characterization, coherently with their expressive status, always out of norms.