Nordic Prosody

This volume contains the revised texts of talks and posters given at the Nordic Prosody X conference, held at the University of Helsinki, in August 2008. The contributions by Scandinavian and other researchers cover a wide range of prosody-related topics from various theoretical and methodological points of view. Although the history of the conference series is Nordic and Scandinavian, the current volume presents studies that are of mainly Baltic origin in the sense that of the eight languages presented in the proceedings only English is not natively spoken around the Baltic Sea. Research issues addressed in the 25 articles include various aspects of speech prosody, their regional variation within and across languages as well as social and idiolectal variation. Speech technology and modelling of prosody are also addressed in more than one article.

The volume represents a state-of-the-art snapshot of the research on prosody for phoneticians, linguists and speech technologists. It covers well-known models and languages. How are prosodies linked to speech sounds? What are the relations between prosody and grammar? What does speech perception tell us about prosody, particularly about the constituting elements of intonation and rhythm? The papers of the volume address questions like these with a special focus on how the notion of context-based coding, the knowledge of prosodic functions and the communicative embedding of prosodic elements can advance our understanding of prosody.

This book illustrates an approach to prosodic typology through descriptions of the intonation and the prosodic structure of thirteen typologically different languages based on the same theoretical framework, the 'autosegmental-metrical' model of intonational phonology, and the transcriptionsystem of prosody known as Tones and Break Indices (ToBI). It is the first book introducing the history and principles of this system and it covers European languages, Asian languages, an Australian aboriginal language, and an American Indian language. The book shows how languages and dialects aresimilar to or different from other languages or dialect varieties in terms of the prosodic structure, the intonational categories, and their realizations. This is the first book on intonation which is accompanied by a CD-ROM where sound files mentioned in each chapter are stored.