Italian intonation: An overview and some questions

Abstract

This paper presents a selective state of the art for the intonation ofStandard and regional varieties of Italian, drawing especially from Neapolitan Italian data. Production and perception experimental data for this variety are employed to show some interesting interactions between focus, accent placement and accent type. The issues are presented within the autosegmental-metrical approach to intonational phonology. Points for future research are suggested. Brought to you by | University of Connecticut Authenticated Download Date | 6/5/15 12:38 AM 1. I shall be concerned hence with the mere Neapolitan accent and not the Neapolitan dialetto, which differs from Standard Italian also morphologically and syntactically. Brought to you by | University of Connecticut Authenticated Download Date | 6/5/15 12:38 AM 2. Early acoustic investigations based on Northern varieties of Italian later suggested that whquestions can also be characterized by a terminal rise, which would make them quite similar to yes/no questions (Magno Caldognetto, Ferrero, Lavagnoli and Vagges 1978). 3. A similar distinction between tonia and protonia has been employed for the description of Spanish intonation by Navarro Tomás (cf. Beckman et al., this issue).

Infants’ Perception of the Intonation of Broad and Narrow Focus

“…Together with pitch height and direction, pitch timing is one of the dimensions on which pitch can vary to signal meaning. In fact, pitch timing is a form of pitch contrast that is common across languages (e.g., lexical pitch accent distinction in Swedish, intonation contrasts described for Italian, Catalan, or German -Bruce, 1977;D'Imperio, 2002;Kohler, 2005;Vanrell et al, 2013), and perceptually pitch timing differences have been equated to pitch height differences in adults' perception: early peaks behave as low peaks and late peaks as high peaks (House, 1990;Gussenhoven, 2002). Importantly, there is a tendency for the highlighting of information (narrow/contrastive focus) to be signalled by peak height or peak timing and pitch excursion size across languages (Gussenhoven, 2002(Gussenhoven, , 2004.…”

Initial peaks and final falls in the intonation of Manchego Spanish wh-questions

“…The side-by-side comparison of wh-question L2 and FT is provided to indicate the magnitude of the F 0 descent for each speaker after the L2 point. Statement FT data are provided to indicate the baseline of a particular speaker's low F 0 threshold (see D'Imperio 2002;Ladd 2008: 100). Quantitative results are given in Table 17.…”

Contrastive focus vs. discourse-new: Evidence from phonetic prominence in English

“…But others (including Halliday 1967, Chafe 1976, Rochemont 1986, Pierrehumbert & Beckman 1988, Kiss 1998, Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998, Frota 2000, Face 2002, D'Imperio 2002, LeGac 2002, Selkirk 2002, Neeleman and Szendroi 2003, Kratzer 2004, Féry and Samek-Lodovici 2006, Kratzer and Selkirk 2007, 2010 would see the common capacity to bear obligatory pitch accents in English as obscuring a fundamental semantic (and syntactic) distinction between contrastive focus and discourse-new. It is the distinction in their phonetic properties, this paper shows, that supports the postulation of a grammatical distinction between contrastive focus and discourse-new.…”