Phonetic Detail in Intonation Contour Dynamics

Overview & Synopsis

The Autosegmental-Metrical theory of intonation investigates the relationship between f0 contours and post-lexical meaning. Phonetic data are represented in the phonology as a sequence of discrete, local events. The properties of the transitions between one event and the next are considered to be phonologically irrelevant (§1). We present data on Neapolitan Italian which show a significant correlation between the shape of these transitions and the pragmatic context in which a sentence is uttered. This correlation is stronger than the one displayed by traditional autosegmental-metrical indices (§2 and §3). In the conclusions, we discuss the usefulness of our findings as a step towards the finetuning of the autosegmental-metrical theory (§4).