Mesoamerica

The Mesoamerican linguistic area is rich with prosodic phenomena, including a wide variety of complex tone, phonation, stress, and intonational systems. The diversity of prosodic patterns in Mesoamerica reflects the extreme time-depth and complex history of the languages spoken there. This chapter surveys the prosody of Mesoamerican languages and some past analyses of their structures. Topics include the areal distribution of tonal complexity; interactions between stress, tone, and segmental contrasts; the phonetics of tone and phonation; metrical structure; and higher-level prosodic phenomena. Case studies from different languages also highlight interactions between morphological and word-prosodic structure. These topics underscore the importance of research on Mesoamerican languages to both phonological theory and linguistic typology.

Prosody in Automatic Speech Processing

Automatic speech processing (ASP) is understood as covering word recognition, the processing of higher linguistic components (syntax, semantics, and pragmatics), and the processing of computational paralinguistics (CP), which deals with speaker states and traits. This chapter attempts to track the role of prosody in ASP from the word level up to CP. A short history of the field from 1980 to 2020 distinguishes the early years (until 2000)—when the prosodic contribution to the modelling of linguistic phenomena, such as accents, boundaries, syntax, semantics, and dialogue acts, was the focus—from the later years, when the focus shifted to paralinguistics; prosody ceased to be visible. Different types of predictor variables are addressed, among them high-performance power features as well as leverage features, which can also be employed in teaching and therapy.

Sub-Saharan Africa

This chapter maps out the tonal, accentual, and intonational properties of sub-Saharan African languages, focusing particularly on Niger-Congo. It distinguishes tone systems by the number of contrastive tone heights and contours and their tonal distributions, as well as grammatical functions of tone. It considers positional prominence effects potentially analysed as word accent and concludes with discussion of both intonational pitch and length marking syntactic domains and clause types.

China and Siberia

This chapter provides a summary of the prosodic systems of varieties of Chinese spoken in mainland China and Taiwan as well as languages in Siberia, in particular Ket. What the Chinese languages and Ket share is their tonal nature. This chapter highlights three unique aspects of the prosody of these languages. First, it surveys the typologically complex patterns of tonal alternation known as ‘tone sandhi’ and provides a summary of current experimental findings on the productivity of these patterns. Second, it discusses the patterns of lexical and phrasal stress and their interaction with tone, with a focus on the similar metrical principles that underlie tone languages and other languages. Third, it surveys the different types of interaction between lexical tone and the intonational use of pitch, in particular focus and interrogativity. These issues are first discussed in the context of Chinese languages, then echoed in a brief summary of Ket prosody.

Articulatory Measures of Prosody

Prosodic research in speech production usually focuses on the way the prosodic structure influences the phonetic implementation of segmental and suprasegmental features. The realization of a tone, for instance, involves not only dynamic changes so as to regulate the vocal fold vibration to produce f0 contours, but also the movement of articulators to simultaneously produce consonants and vowels. Articulatory measuring techniques help us to directly observe how these two systems are coordinated in the spatio-temporal dimension. A number of such techniques are discussed, along with examples indicating how each technique may be or has been used to study various aspects of prosody. They include laryngoscopy and electroglottography to examine laryngeal events associated with vocal fold vibration; systems such as electromagnetic articulography, an optoelectronic device, electropalatography, and ultrasound systems to explore supralaryngeal articulatory events; and aerodynamic measurement systems to record oral/subglottal pressure and oral/nasal flow.

Intonation Systems Across Varieties of English

This chapter focuses on the structure and systematicity underlying the expression of intonation in varieties of English. Phonologically, this involves tones and clusters of tones with associations to heads and edges of prosodic domains, functionally highlighting and delimiting units within these domains. Phonetically, it involves pitch and its acoustic correlate, in addition to other phonetic parameters that contribute towards structuring speech, such as duration and spectral quality. Both mainstream and non-mainstream varieties are considered, the latter often showing contact effects determining the presence or absence of lexical tone and lexical stress, as well as post-lexical structures that do not fit neatly into Jun’s (2006) head/edge-prominence dichotomy. The survey shows that an account of the intonation of ‘Englishes’ has to cover a broad range of typological phenomena and be flexible enough to capture properties of emerging varieties, some of which will be briefly discussed.

Central and Eastern Europe

The languages of Central and Eastern Europe addressed in this chapter form a typologically divergent collection that includes Slavic (Belarusian, Bulgarian, Czech, Macedonian, Polish, Russian, pluricentric Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian), Baltic (Latvian, Lithuanian), Finno-Ugric (Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian), and Romance (Romanian). Their prosodic features and structures have been explored to various depths, from different theoretical perspectives, sometimes on the basis of relatively sparse material. Still, enough is known to see that their typological divergence as well as other factors contribute to vivid differences in their prosodic systems. While belonging to intonational languages, they differ in pitch patterns and their usage, duration, and rhythm (some involve phonological duration), as well as prominence mechanisms, accentuation, and word stress (fixed or mobile). Several languages in the area have what is referred to by different traditions as pitch accents, tones or syllable accents, or intonations.

Introduction

This chapter identifies three recent developments that have helped to promote the study of language prosody in recent years. It briefly reviews definitions of language prosody, points out that these vary in their emphasis on form or function, and concludes that definitions are closely linked to the level of understanding that has been reached in the field. The chapter presents an account of the decisions that were made at the outset of the project and lays out the handbook’s structure. A final section lists a number of topics that have not been included and gives reasons for their absence from the survey.

Austronesia

While the Austronesian family is large, the main focus of this chapter is on the languages of the Philippines and Indonesia as very little is known about other parts of the family. In the languages analysed to date, intonational targets are often anchored to the edges rather than to metrically strong syllables, most intonational phrases ending with a major pitch excursion within a two- or three-syllable window. These languages often also lack evidence for word-based prominence (lexical stress), but in Philippine languages vowel length distinctions are phonemic and mobile, which is cross-linguistically unusual. Deviating from this general picture, languages in the southern half of Sulawesi and possibly further east tend to show word-based prominence on the penultimate syllable, with significant variation as to which clitics enter into the stress window. Lexical tone is only attested in small subgroups scattered across the area and generally due to language contact.

North Africa and the Middle East

This chapter provides an overview of the prosodic systems of languages spoken in North Africa and the Middle East, taking in North Africa and the Horn of Africa, plus the Arabian Peninsula, and the Middle East (but excluding Kurdish). The survey sketches the nature and scope of typological variation—in respect to prosody—across the whole of the Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan language families, addressing, within the limits of the existing literature: word prosody, prosodic phrasing, melodic structure, and prosodic expression of meaning (sentence modality, focus, and information structure). The survey is organized around language sub-families, reporting what is known about the different aspects of prosody for each sub-family, together with a brief discussion of priorities for future research.