Semiotics Institute Online

Most if not all recent studies of sentence intonation adopt the theoretical views developed by Pierrehumbert-Beckman, including the ToBI set of notation tools to describe intonation events. We will depart from this dominant approaches to propose a different way to describe sentence intonation in languages such as French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, English and European and Brazilian Portuguese.

Our approach is equally based on the existence of a Prosodic Structure (PS) in the sentence, which entertains a sovereignty-association relationship with the syntactic structure. This means that the PS organizes units (the prosodic words) as the syntactic structure does organize syntactic units, but independently as it has to conform with its own constraint rules, such as a) a stress clash condition, b) a syntactic collision rule (that prevents two prosodic words dominated by distinct nodes in the syntactic structure to form a prosodic group), and c) a rhythmic rule (which plays an essential role in French for example).