Speech Prosody: from Acoustics to Interpretation

This book presents the author's personal overview of Speech Prosody, and in particular the different areas in which he has been especially interested over the last few decades. These include the acoustics of speech prosody, the relationship between lexical and non-lexical prosody, the phonology of prosody, the modeling of rhythm and of melody, and the central question of the various and at times quite mysterious ways in which prosody contributes to the interpretation of an utterance. All these aspects are then brought together in an account of the description of intonation systems, and how these differ across languages.