Review of Intonation in Romance, by Sónia Frota and Pilar Prieto (Eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press

Abstract

The edited volume, Intonation in Romance, comprises eleven chapters: nine content chapters summarise the results of detailed prosodic analysis of intonation patterns across varieties of a particular Romance language, and are framed by an introduction and conclusion by the editors. The languages treated include those whose intonation systems have received much attention (Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish), alongside less-studied languages (Friulian, Occitan, Romanian and Sardinian). All chapters used the same methods of data collection and analysis: parallel data across languages was elicited with a common set of dialogue completion tasks; intonation patterns in the data are analysed on the basis of a shared implementation of the Tone and Break Indices (ToBI) model of prosodic annotation, within the Autosegmental-Metrical framework. These shared methods inform direct comparison of Romance intonation patterns and systems, within and across languages, to identify the scope and potential causes of variation, as well as avenues for future research.