This book offers the first comprehensive description of the prosody of nine Romance
languages that takes into account internal dialectal variation. Teams of experts examine the …

This paper reports on the prosody of rhetorical questions (RQs) and information-seeking
questions (ISQs) in German for two question types—polar questions and constituent …

Catalan is a Romance language that is spoken by about 10 million people in a region that
lies within four adjacent European states, namely Andorra, Italy, France, and Spain. 1 Fig …

Different polar question forms (eg, Do you/Do you not/Don't you/Really? Do you... have a
car?) are not equally appropriate in all situations. The present experiments investigate which …

The aim of this study was to test if the meaning of intonational contours involves speaker
commitment and attitude attribution to the addressee. We examined whether the pragmatic …

During interpersonal communication, listeners must rapidly evaluate verbal and vocal cues
to arrive at an integrated meaning about the utterance and about the speaker, including a …

This study investigates the phonetics of German nuclear rise-fall contours in relation to
contexts that trigger either a contrastive or a non-contrastive interpretation in the answer. A …

Many varieties of Romance show more than one intonation contour available for polar
question (PQ) marking. Understanding the pragmatic licensing conditions for these contours …

Although intonation has been traditionally claimed to be a strong indicator of the epistemic
commitments of the participants in a discourse, very few empirical investigations have …

This chapter examines how politeness in offers and requests is encoded by intonation in
Catalan, a language which uses two distinct intonational pitch contours for unbiased yes-no …