Prosody and Syntax

Book excerpt: This collection of papers is the third volume of the series “Usage-Based Linguistic Informatics” (UBLI), a product of the 21st Century COE Program of the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (TUFS). Prosody, as used in this text, appears in units larger than segments and generally refers to the field that studies various phonological properties connected to utterances involving pitch, intensity, and length. These phonetic features almost always appear within complex combinations such as word and sentence accents and intonation. The subtitle, Cross-Linguistic perspectives, does not imply mere, cross-linguistic comparison and contrast of the prosodic phenomena. Rather, it implies that there are a variety of approaches which are unique to each language for prosodic analysis. In fact, the volume consists of prosodic analyses in 12 different languages : French, English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Makonde, Indonesian, Tagalog and Turkish.